The elegance of the in-dash MP3 player has finally pushed me over the edge, and I feel the need to join the ranks of MP3 listening geeks worldwide. (A personal note, this is extremely irregular for me, I am a dyed-in-the-wool analog nerd - my stereo has 30 vacuum tubes, and NO transistors anywhere... also, no CD player; I still use a magnetic phonograph as my source). But I digress.... I'm looking for a mini-distro that will work as a dedicated MP3 player - kind of an "instant MP3 player, just add your own kernel" approach. I'm initially discounting the UMSDOS approach, as it is generally considered an inferior filesystem - but might there be some speed advantages to using a DOS or FAT32 filesystem for a dedicated MP3 system? What about defragmenting DOS / FAT32 filesystems under linux? I would expect the player to be controlled from a simple telnet (or SSH? you tell me the advantages / disadvantages of either approach) and possibly a dumb terminal running on a serial port. In this way, the player could be commanded from any machine on my LAN (read: in my house), or from the terminal. I suppose an IRDA port on the machine, and a generic remote-control might also be a very nice feature to implement... So my first questions are, does such a distro already exist? It seems like everything needed would fit on several floppies... What sort of Linux software exists for 'jukebox' type MP3 playing, from the command line? For managing all of the MP3 files? Has someone else already done this, such that I can just focus on my hardware issues and not ask any more questions about software or OS? On the subject of hardware, have there been any A/B listening tests of various soundcard's audio quality? Are there any true "high end" soundcards - meaning cards that use film caps instead of electrolytics, low noise / low inductance resistors, low-noise op-amps, extra EMF / RF shielding, decent design & metallurgy in the audio connectors etc ? Finally, does anyone have a mini-case upon which I can start the hardware portions of this project? It will need space for a CD-ROM and at least 2 ISA slots - to take the soundcard and NIC. Onboard video would be fine. 1 Serial port is also a requirement. From what I gather, I should not need more than a 486DX-2/66 with about 8-12MB of RAM to do the job. I have _plenty_ of good stuff to trade for the right case combo. I would appreciate any comments on using a portion of RAM as a RAMdisk to act as a playback 'queue' to prevent drop-outs during disk access. Sorry this post got long, thanks for the bandwidth, Bill --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org