>I have about 240 songs on one 650MB CD.  It's a 5-disk
>changer.  I don't doubt that "marking off played songs"
>is a standard technique, but with over 1000 potential songs,
.....
>before the MP3 chip got added...  16 bits/song or even one
>byte/song is probably quite impossible, and even 1bit/song
>(128+ bytes) is looking like more memory than there is...

sounds like a case to put a small external FRAM chip on I2C or similar
interface to hold the "played list". Imagine having the power supply go
down, and still not hear a song repeated until all songs had been played
once :)))

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