On Sun, Jan 23, 2000 at 12:56:48PM -0800, Wolfgang Rupprecht wrote:
> jmarin@pyy.jmp.fi (Jukka Marin) writes:
> > I was talking about the good old music CD's.. and I don't think it's
> > cheap enough to put 100 or 200 CD's on a hard disk yet :-)
> 
> The 37Gig 3.5" x 1" high IBM Deskstar is selling for just under $300
> mailorder.  My music CD's are about ~400Megs (before converting to
> MP3).  One can fit just under 100 CD's on that disk.  Thats pretty
> competitive with the 100-CD changers, and the seek time is a heck of a
> lot better. ;-)

Hmm.  You make it sound interesting. :-))  If only xmcd knew how to play
music off a hard disk..

On Sun, Jan 23, 2000 at 02:04:11PM -0700, Miles Nordin wrote:
> The way I see it, it's even cheaper to put 100 music CD's on a hard disk,
> because you can make them into MP3's.  If all your CD's are full 72
> minutes, your collection would take about 5.5 - 11 GB, which is probably
> cost-competitive with a 100- or 200-CD jukebox.

Have you ever compared the sound quality of original CD's to that of mp3's?
:-)  Well, mp3's are usable, but there'sstilla big difference.  (I'd like
to convert my LP records to mp3's, though, if I had the software..  DAP
can't record directly to hard disk, I guess I should write some quick and
dirty hack for this..)

On Sun, Jan 23, 2000 at 04:17:35PM -0500, Laine Stump wrote:
> Well, in 96Kbps stereo MP3 format, each CD is 44MB, so you can get 200 CDs
> worth of music on 8.8GB. Of course, the quality isn't as good as the
> original CD, but it's definitely good enough for the speakers on my
> machine! :-)

:-)  It doesn't make sense to bring good speakers into this room full of
computer noise :-I

> Lately, I've been wishing that somebody would figure out how to make a PC's
> IR port talk to a conventional remote control, then write an MP3 player
> program that could be controlled with the remote. If that happened, I'd
> probably throw away the CD changer in my stereo system and plug in some
> little 1U high box with a 13GB disk (and maybe a TV tuner card so I could
> replace my TV too...)

I'm not sure if this is possible.  The remote controls [that I have see]
use a carrier frequency around 40 kHz and modulate it with data (transmitting
pulse trains).  I don't know if the PC IR port hardware can demodulate this
kind of signal.

BUT, there are small and cheap (around $2) IR receiver modules which do
the demodulation.. you still need to decode the pulses, though.  (Would
be easy with a small microcontroller..)

On Sun, Jan 23, 2000 at 08:47:17PM -0800, Jonathan R. Hinds wrote:
> 
> I've got 220 cd's currently occupying about 11.1 gigs. I think thats
> reasonable. Plus the instant access to any of them is great, and nfs
> exporting the whole thing provides the entire house with music.

What software do you use to play the music?
"cp /music/disc123/song05 /dev/audio" ? :-)

  -jm