[techtalk] mp3 car player & cd changer unilink cabling

[TeknoDragon]

Hi, my wife and I are planning on buying a car soon (see social list), and
so I'm starting to look into building an mp3 player. The only desirable
prebuilt system that I can see for this is the empeg player ($1100+
www.empeg.com). so....

I'd like to be able to build one myself so that I can save money (but
maybe have to sacrifice trunk space) take mp3 cd's that we burn and store
a lot on its hard drive. Since we allready have a few cpu's (an amd 586
and a P166) and lots of ram lying around we'd really be looking for a
tiny motherboard and an equally tiny case. There's a few good looking
power supplies listed on mp3car.com and a lot of stories (most windoze tho
;-/).

For hardware requirements I'm looking at:
	16 bit audio
		have sb16 and an ensoniq pci, but onboard saves space
	two 3.5 bays and one to two 5.25 bays
		a multidisc changer would be nice, but most need SCSI
			linux drivers for disc changer?
	ethernet
		probably the simplest way to transfer to a home computer
		appletalk would be the best option for its automation
		are there any appletalk (AFS) clients for windoze?
			will need to operate with a pc occasionally
	swappable (not necessarily hotswap) power supply
		might have to hack one
	small footprint
		will probably be in the back of a hatchback, in the
		cdchanger space or in some other semi-out of the way place
*	interface with cdchanger unilink power, control, ground calbe
		is there some piece of hardware that will interface with
		this?

For the software I'm deffinately considering a
modified route66 suite (http://elmer.imaginemedia.com/route66/)
to accompany whatever unilink solution can be found, and to facillitate
intelligent managing of a cd-changer library (as pnp as i can make
it) possibly including caching of entire songs on the hd for playlists
that span several discs

Getting all of this information to the front of the car might require a
separate lcd, but I'd like to see how much I can get in the unilink
control interface...


this sort of thing would be a great kit to produce for mp3/linux
enthusiests... I'm suprised noone's tried it yet. Any comments and
suggestions are welcome!


-karl