Category Archives: mp3

Chest of Drawers Stores Audio Memories

Posted on by

Some people collect stamps, some collect barbed wire, and some people even collect little bits of silicon and plastic. But the charmingly named [videoschmideo] collects memories, mostly of his travels around the world with his wife. Trinkets and treasures are easy to keep track of, but he found that storing the audio clips he collects a bit more challenging. Until he built this audio memory chest, that is.

Granted, you might not be a collector of something as intangible as audio files, and even if you are, it seems like Google Drive or Dropbox might be the more sensible place …read more

Continue reading Chest of Drawers Stores Audio Memories→

Cluephone for Partiers

Posted on by

[Sam Horne] adapted an old school landline phone to deliver clues to birthday party guests. When guests find a numerical clue, they type it into the keypad to hear  the next clue, which involves decoding some Morse code.

The phone consists of an Arduino Pro Mini, a MP3/WAV trigger, and the phone itself, of which the earpiece and keypad have been reused. [Sam] had to map out the keypad and solder leads connecting the various contact points of the phone’s PCB to the Arduino’s digital pins. He used a digitally-generated voice to generate the audio files, and employed the Keypad …read more

Continue reading Cluephone for Partiers→

Patents on MP3 Format Due to Expire

Posted on by

MP3 took off in the late 90s as the digital music format. It then proceeded to slaughter the CD, and launch the file sharing revolution as well. It’s a proud format that has roots stretching all the way back to the early 1980s, when the possibility of sending music over ISDN lines was first considered. Now the patents on it are beginning to expire and its licencing program has been terminated.

The MP3 standard was the property of Fraunhofer IIS, and the original licencing model was intended such that encoders would be expensive, and decoders relatively inexpensive. This would allow …read more

Continue reading Patents on MP3 Format Due to Expire→

Scratchy Brings Digital Clarity To The Vinyl World

Posted on by

If you walk the halls of audiophilia, you may be aware that there has been a huge amount of work put in to software designed to clean up older audio recordings without compromising the quality of the recording itself. Sometimes the results can be amazing, such as when a stereo image is created from parallel mono recordings made before stereo was even a glint in the eye of a 1930s EMI engineer.

But what if you are at home, without the benefit of a state-of-the-art studio or high-end digital signal processing? How can you then have pop and crackle free …read more

Continue reading Scratchy Brings Digital Clarity To The Vinyl World→

Bantam-sized Jukebox Reproduction Tops the Fabrication Charts

Posted on by

Restoring a genuine vintage jukebox is a fun project, but finding suitable candidates can be a difficult proposition. Not only can a full-size machine take a huge bite out of your wallet, it can take up a lot of room, too. So a replica miniature jukebox might be just the thing.

We have to admit, at first glance [Allan_D_Murray]’s project seemed like just another juke upgrade. It was only after diving into his very detailed build log that we realized this classic-looking juke is only about 30″ (80 cm) tall. It’s not exactly diminutive, but certainly more compact than the …read more

Continue reading Bantam-sized Jukebox Reproduction Tops the Fabrication Charts→

Bantam-sized Jukebox Reproduction Tops the Fabrication Charts

Posted on by

Restoring a genuine vintage jukebox is a fun project, but finding suitable candidates can be a difficult proposition. Not only can a full-size machine take a huge bite out of your wallet, it can take up a lot of room, too. So a replica miniature jukebox might be just the thing.

We have to admit, at first glance [Allan_D_Murray]’s project seemed like just another juke upgrade. It was only after diving into his very detailed build log that we realized this classic-looking juke is only about 30″ (80 cm) tall. It’s not exactly diminutive, but certainly more compact than the …read more

Continue reading Bantam-sized Jukebox Reproduction Tops the Fabrication Charts→

Sansa MP3 Player Runs Doom Unplayably

Posted on by

DOOM, is there anything it won’t run on? Yes. Your front lawn cannot currently play DOOM. Pretty much everything else can though. It’s a testament to the game’s impact on society that it gets ported to virtually every platform with buttons and a graphical screen.

This video shows a Sansa Clip playing DOOM, but it’s only just barely recognizable. The Sansa Clip has a single color screen, with yellow pixels at the top and grey for the rest of the screen. The monochrome display makes things hard to see, so a dithering technique is used to try and make things …read more

Continue reading Sansa MP3 Player Runs Doom Unplayably→

Code Like an Egyptian

Posted on by

[Marcelo Maximiano’s] son had a school project. He and a team of students built “The Pyramid’s Secret“–an electronic board game using the Arduino Nano. [Marcelo] helped with the electronics, but the result is impressive and a great example of packaging an Arduino project. You can see a video of the game, below.

In addition to the processor, the game uses a WT5001M02 MP3 player (along with an audio amplifier) to produce music and voices. There’s also a rotary encoder, an LCD, a EEPROM (to hold the quiz questions and answers), and an LED driver. There’s also a bunch of LEDs, …read more

Continue reading Code Like an Egyptian→

Raspberry Pi Plays All That Jazz

Posted on by

[James Bellafaire] wanted a good looking old radio with a modern sound. Granted, you could hollow the case out and replace it with an iPod. Or you could convert the thing to an Internet radio. But where’s the fun in that?

[James] took a different approach. Part woodworking project, part Raspberry Pi project, and part microcontroller project, he wound up with a hard drive-based music player in a 1930’s case with knobs that control the playback.

Since the Pi isn’t great at reading potentiometers, [James] took at ATTiny85 and used it for that purpose. Coupled with a few hundred old …read more

Continue reading Raspberry Pi Plays All That Jazz→