rockbox mp3 player playing direct from external hard drive

[JMoo666]

I am wondering how possible it would be to install rockbox on an mp3 player, then on an external hard drive, and possibly creating playlists to access with the mp3 player plugged directly to the usb.

this is my first post and sorry if I am doing something wrong. I did look around at the nodos and a couple pages of posts in this area.

I have installed rockbox on a pair of iPod minis. I have a hard drive that we all share for music that we access with macs and pcs. I just want to make it easier to play the 700+ gb of music we have. It would be nice to not have to use a pc or mac to create and play playlists.

I am in no way a developer. I am a consumer but I do think this seems possible. any feedback?

[saratoga]

I don't think any of our devices are capable of acting as a host to an MSC device.  In theory you might be able to hack together code and electronics to make it work on a few players, but if you're not quite experienced with USB development you're not going to be able to figure it out.

If you just want to be able to access an external disk full of music for a stereo, theres literally hundreds of products out there that can do that as well as a few open source projects (e.g. XBMC).  Check out one of those. 

[gbl08ma]

Neither the external hard drive nor the iPods are able to act as USB host devices, and since client to client USB connection is not
possible (not to talk about the fact that there wouldn't be enough power coming from USB to make the external drive spin up, so you'd need a power brick), what you're suggesting is not possible from my point of view.

(saratoga came first saying nearly the same, but here this goes anyways)

[gevaerts]

Some of our players can do USB host, but writing a host stack is a lot of work...

[JMoo666]

Thanks for the information guys..I have my pc connected to my home stereo and can just do it the old fashioned way I suppose.

I also have an mr500i (Olympus mRobe) that I have played around with but I bet it's still the same issue..

    

[pamaury]

Like gevaerts said, some players can do usb host and some can probably do OTG but in any case, the power supply might well be limiting factor. It's not uncommon that laptops are not able to provide enough current with one cable for a hard drive to work, so I let you imagine with a DAP