Using rockbox inside old radio

[fabiopbb]

Recently I got a beautiful old radio from a friend that appears to be 50 or 60 years old. It's not working.

I would like to transform this decorative radio into something a bit more interesting. My idea is to rig inside it an mp3 player full of songs and radio news from the 50s and 60s in such a way that it would behave as if it's tuned into an old radio station.

I don't want to try to create any kind of interface between the radio and the player beyond the on/off button. Volume should be controlled directly over the speaker, so no need to access the player's volume setting. No interface whatsoever - just turn it on and it starts playing tracks.

So basically what I need is an mp3 player with a reasonable capacity (8 or 16gb) and a very important feature: whenever the ac power is turned on, it starts playing it's content randomly. Could I possibly do this with a Rockbox firmware? I still don't have the player itself, so I guess I could buy an specific player for this task if such feature is available for selected combinations of model and firmware.

Any idea? Thank you very much.

[gevaerts]

That should be possible, yes. Most players will boot into rockbox when power is switched on, and rockbox has a setting to start playing straight away if there is a current playlist.

I would avoid the ipod classic and the ipod nano 2g for this, as I believe they have a bug where for some people the player finds a USB connection for only a charger, which makes it go into USB mode, which isn't what you want. Personally I'd probably get one of the sansa players, probably a clip zip, and use a microSD card for content.

So the thing to do would be to set the "repeat" option to "shuffle"  (so things don't play in the same order twice), set the "start screeen" option to "resume playback" so it starts playing on power up, and add all files to the playlist (using the recursive insert function).

[toehser]

Sure... I have a ClipZip, when connected to USB power without a computer, it will just come on into Rockbox and random play if I set it that way.  When the power disconnects, it will turn off if you have 'car adapter mode' and 'idle poweroff'.  So I think it will do what you want completely.

[fabiopbb]

Thank you guys. I'll put my hands on a Zip Clip and give it a try.

I'll come back to post news when the project is done (in a few months, probably).

Cheers!