It's the same old picture I posted here months ago, but now that this subject has its own forum section, I think I may post it again...

- very small "thin-client" type of PC, Celeron 566, 256 MB RAM, Win2K Pro
- completely fanless, cooled only by a heatpipe and aluminum chassis
- external power supply
- ultra-silent 10GB Fujitsu 2.5" Disk of the Hornet Series (Fluid Drive Bearing), the quietest drive on the market
- due to the PC being 100% closed, there is absolutely no noise at all - none whatsoever!
- 12.1" TFT touchscreen
- Connected via a USB Wireless LAN 802.11b at 11mbps to my main PC and MP3 Server in another room.
- UPDATE: now no longer connects to a PC, but to a Linksys NAS (network attached storage), a small box with an external USB disk, located noise-free inside a filing cabinet in another room. Now I can listen to music even when the main PC is switched off.
- output via a USB external S/PDIF digital soundcard (Sonica by M-Audio) to a standalone D/A converter for highest sound quality.

looks great

around how much did the whole thing cost you?

Me? Ahem...well...I am really really lucky - the only actual money I spent on this rig was about $50 for the M-Audio Sonica.

That's because the company I work for actually manufactures these machines (they are sold as Point Of Sale terminals) and I managed to get a demo machine that came back from a trade show. The real price would have been at least something like $1500 - $1800 for a ready-to-roll machine.

If you are building something like this yourself from special PC components you could probably do it for something like $1300 would be my guess.

Demnos,

Do you actually stream the mp3s wirelessly? I have problems doing that. Got to keep 'em local.

Don

Looking around for a touchscreen, but they are expensive as hell...

looks great anyhow

Well, believe it or not, I was running this for 6 months on my old 2MBit Wireless and only recently switched to 11MBit. With 2Mbit, the databse building was painlessly slow, but for playback it worked flawlessly.

Actually, in the beginning I also had lots of problems with glitches and droputs, but they all went away the second I added the Sqrsoft X-Fading Plugin to Winamp. This X-Fading plugin actually does all of the buffering etc and apparently can do this much better than the normal Winamp Output module.

On the network side I did nothing special, it is just a Shared directory on a W2K PC that I read the MP3s from.

I used to have the 2 mbit Proxim setup. Thought it was great till 11b. Sure there is plenty of bandwidth to handle any encoding rate, but I am plagued with hiccups when playing remotely. No way to wire the garage (gameroom) so using 11b. I used remote desktop to manage the player and mp3s. (I am constantly changing things). It is nice to sit with a laptop and run the jukebox wirelessly in the garage, editing, deleting, etc., but it has the same hiccups. I think the machine that holds the files gets busy every 10- 15 seconds and intterupts the stream. Hadn't thought about the buffer. That square soft X fader is great. Everyone is impressed. Constant stream of music.

Don