Building a Music player From an old computer

[lostone1993]

Ok I have a really old computer I don’t use (it can just run XP) anyway my plan for it, It has an internal speaker, CD drive, Floppy Disk Drive and a hard drive. I plan to make it so that I just turn it on, it starts to play music. From my understanding it would only require a keyboard plugged in to work and a monitor sometimes just to debug. These are the ways I have thought of

 

1. Use the hard drive with XP

I install xp, Write a bat file to start a media player and load a track list, and Set it in start-up

Cons- Difficult to set up

 

2. Use Linux (A friend of mine did this, Not sure how though)

I use a cd or usb with Linux on it, it has some commands to start a media player loads a track list or songs from HD, Starts playing

Cons- I have never used Linux :P

 

3. DOS

Some how write a program that just Boots and runs that Selects a song at random and plays it

Cons- difficult to get new songs on the HD to use

 

 

So what the Thoughts on my idea's

If you have some better ones I am Interested

[bben46]

#1 Is extremely simple - learning to write a batch (.bat) file to start something is not at all difficult.

 

#2 Is not very hard either - if you already know something about Linux. If you don't, you could probably get the procedure from your friend. Then forget about WinXP and install the Linux distro on your HD with the autostart. This would probably be the way I would do it for myself.

 

#3 More difficult as you will probably have to write the entire thing in BASIC, then write a bat file to start it. - the bat would be the easy part as it can be incorporated directly into the autoexec.bat that runs when DOS is started.

 

Another alternative - if you can get internet access for the music box. Have it start in XP and go online, start and sign onto a music service such as Pandora. Again, either an autostart batch or script can do that.