MP3 Car/MP3 OS

Welcome to the home of MP3 OS (that's MacOS 8.1 with a hacked resourse fork just for playing MP3's on a Performa 6290 in my Geo Metro). These pages outline how I did it, what was involved, and how you can do it too, if you want!

A few months ago, I wandered across a site describing how a guy in the UK had installed a computer in his Mazda Miata for the sole purpose of playing MP3's. I thought this was the coolest thing I had ever seen!
As far as I know, it was the first of a dozen or so "MP3 Cars"that have since popped up on the web. I wanted to do the same thing, but with a Mac.

I have also made a Mac SE into an Aquarium, check it out!

Bienvenidos al "domicilio" de MP3 Systema Operativo (eso es el Systema Operativo Macintosh customizado con diferente picturas, solo para tocar MP3 en mi Auto: Geo Metro). Aquí tienes como lo hice, que fue involucrado, y tambien si quieres, ¡como tu puedes hacerlo tambien!

Hace algunas meses, encontré un sitio de alguien del Reino Unido quien había instalado una computadora en su Mazda Miata, solamente para tocar MP3. ¡Creí que esto era la cosa más padrísimo que yo jamás había visto!
De lo que yo se, esto era el primero de una dozena o tanto "MP3 Cars" (Autos de MP3) que han aparecido desde entonces. You quería hacerlo tambien, pero con una Macintosh

Tambien he convertido una Mac antigua a una aquario, ¡mirelo!

News:

March 15th 2000:Holy cow! it's been a long time since I updated this! You should be happy to know that I now have quicktime movies about my MP3 player up. I'll be adding more functionality and different sizes in a bit, but for now, go here for the 2.3MB version.

October 25th: Well, I actually needed to add this about 2 weeks ago, but I'm lazy. I put a whole bunch of Music Videos on a CD as 160x120 cinepack compressed Quicktime 4 movies @ 15fps (perfect for my slow computer and 2.9 inch LCD). With media cleaner, you have the option with Quicktime 4 of having the movies play full screen automatically on opening. So you can now watch Flacid Bizkit sing "Faith" while going down the road! I'm pleased to say that my MP3 player has graduated from "Geeky" to "Wow! that is so kool, can I watch some more music videos?" or at least that's what my last 3 dates have said.

October 23rd: Slashdot.org has an excellent article that I think any guy even remotely interested in computers should memorize: Uncle Robin's Advice for Lovelorn Geeks.

September 27th: I've been slowly adding to the "Do it yourself" section. I'm still working on some other projects, but it will be eventually finished. Adobe released the Beta version of their webcapture for Acrobat 4 on the Mac, if you want to wait for a 1.2 MB download, you can grab yourself the Off-line version of this site (updated 9-27-99)

9-9-99 (man, I love that!): Welp, on Saturday I pulled both seats out of my Metro, vaccumed the sucker, and then started the final installation. I stuck the 2 CD drives onto the bottom of the passenger seat with those plumber's things used to hold pipes together. They're strong and tighten up nicely with a screw driver, works for me! I hid all the cabling and all, now I'm not ashamed to take dates around in my car. I put 3 new pictures up on the pictures page, but it'll be quite a while until more are up. While I was at Seybold's drooling over the new G4's, someone got into my office and stole our Olympus D-600 digital camera. I moved the old news onto a seperate page as well.

August 12th: Well, thanks to the tornado yesterday, I had time to work on my car. At 18:06 Mountain time (-7:00 GMT), I disconnected the extension cord, hooked the MP3 player up to the inverter and took a ride. The MP3 player is now complete. I burned the new system CD this morning ans drove into work listening to my MP3 player. Sounds pretty good!

August 12th: This server was down for about 12 hours due to a nasty power outage. If you watched the news yesterday or today, you might have heard that Salt Lake City had an F2 tornado rip through the north western part of town. Well, this server is located about 2 blocks for the Delta Center where the Utah Jazz plays, which was one of the buildings hit hard by the tornado. It also blew up a few sub stations. Well at least I had time to go home and work on my car.

August 10th: Wowsers it's been a long time since I did anything on the MP3 player, or updated the news to this page, I think I should move some of the older nes onto a seperate page, since it's getting so large! Here's the major news: I'm completely re-doing the softare and OS for my player, no I am using mainly MacAmp, it's up to par now and has a bigger cache so it doesn't skip like it used to. I also decided that MacOS 8.1 would fill the needs of my player with less system overhead, so that's being used as my OS now.

July 7th: Took some pictures of the stereo, they're on the "Pictures" page. Back to good news! I opened up my power inverter to see if I could fix it myself, maybe replace a capacitor or two. I discovered that the problem was simply a copper "wire" on the board that had heated up so much it had burnt the green stuff over it and melted in half. 3 minutes and some soldering later, the inverter is working again! I'm translating this site into Spanish.

Old news here