Begin playing on power up (autoplay) for small company "on-hold" solution

[justinl]

The "on hold" industry is charging several hundred dollars for an MP3 player with the following essential characteristics:

1) Solid state storage
2) It plays MP3s immediately on power on (i.e. recovers from power failure).
3) It loops forever.

Of course, they get to do this (and have to do this) by having another 12 or so completely irrelevant features and custom plastic cases and firmware.

As MP3 players go, this shouldn't be hard. Being the type who is usually willing to spend more time and money building something myself that "costs less", I was looking at build-em-yourself MP3 player kits. Finally it dawned on me to find or buy an older MP3 player and replace the firmware. Which lead me to RockBox. I'd heard about it, so it was buzzing around in my memory. It appears now that I can save money, and have only exactly what I need.

Looking at the supported MP3 players list, my eye quickly fell onto the "SanDisk Sansa c200". I see a refurb on ebay for $30 (maybe this is rare...), and an AC adapter is available for about 8 bucks (which I'd get) although one could be made pretty easily by soldering the right AC adapter to the battery terminals.

Interested in discussion about this idea, things I'm forgetting, general feasibility, and helpful first steps :-).

[Llorean]

What exactly are you asking here? I don't see mention of anything that relates to plugins, and the manual explains how to make it resume playback automatically upon reboot.

[Febs]

Looking at the supported MP3 players list, my eye quickly fell onto the "SanDisk Sansa c200". I see a refurb on ebay for $30 (maybe this is rare...), and an AC adapter is available for about 8 bucks (which I'd get) although one could be made pretty easily by soldering the right AC adapter to the battery terminals.

Be aware that Rockbox only runs on the C200v1.  It does not run on the C200v2, which is completely different hardware.  The v2 versions say "v2" on the back of the case.  You can also tell them apart by referring to the original Sansa firmware's version number.  The players with Sansa firmware version 01.xx.xx are v1 players, while original firmware version 03.xx.xx are v2 players.

[justinl]

What exactly are you asking here? I don't see mention of anything that relates to plugins, and the manual explains how to make it resume playback automatically upon reboot.

I admit I was assuming I would need a plugin and that this was the correct place to talk about plugins. Thanks for pointing me to the manual. I'll read it carefully for mentions of automatically turning on the repeat function, too, upon reboot.

Be aware that Rockbox only runs on the C200v1.

Thanks for the distinction.

[bascule]

So the simple answer is; yes, Rockbox can do exactly what you are looking for by setting 'repeat all' and 'resume playback on startup'.

If you need a line-out (rather than plugging into the headphone socket), then most modern players only achieve this using some sort of external adapter/docking station.

If it has to be flash, then your choice is iPod nano (1st Gen only) or Sansa e200 or c200 series (both V1 models only). nano's are plentiful and cheap.

[jonjnichols]

The "on hold" industry is charging several hundred dollars for an MP3 player with the following essential characteristics:

1) Solid state storage
2) It plays MP3s immediately on power on (i.e. recovers from power failure).
3) It loops forever.

Looking at the supported MP3 players list, my eye quickly fell onto the "SanDisk Sansa c200". I see a refurb on ebay for $30 (maybe this is rare...), and an AC adapter is available for about 8 bucks (which I'd get) although one could be made pretty easily by soldering the right AC adapter to the battery terminals.

Interested in discussion about this idea, things I'm forgetting, general feasibility, and helpful first steps :-).

justinl,
How did this work out for you?  I'm interested in doing the same thing.
Seems that finding the right version of those devices will be the trick.
I'd really like to hear more on this from you.

jon

[justinl]

How did this work out for you?  I'm interested in doing the same thing.

Works great so far - we've already put it in the server room (velcro on the wall). We bought a used iPod nano 1st gen for about 50 bucks, and then another 8 for an AC adapter. It took almost no time to install Rockbox. I would point out that the two features discussed so far are turned on within the user interface of Rockbox, and not in a config file (which I expected). This did make it easy.

This discussion should no doubt move to another forum, but I'm replying here for the sake of being a complete thread for users finding it from google.

I would also point out that commercial products that I've seen do not have battery backup, which the iPod nano gives. I question how great our particular battery is, but I believe it would last longer than 99% of power outages (which only last for a few seconds).

It's still untested how it behaves from cold boot after losing power for long enough to drain the battery.