MP3 Car - Software

MP3 Car - Software The main piece of software is the operating system. Here is wher eI have deviated from the normal MP3 car. Most have been either Windows, DOS or Linux for the OS but all that I know of are Intel based for the processor. I can do Windows fairly well, but you can't boot it in a GUI off a CD, nor do I know how to customize Windows like I needed to.

I've been using the Mac OS ever since System 6 on a Mac SE running 7.8888 MHz (reported as 8 MHz by AppleSpec) in 1989 (Pagemaker 3.02 was the bomb!). So I feel pretty confident in my abilities with the Mac OS, plus you can run a full version of the OS right off a CD! (For example: in case of a disk crash on my normal computer, I have a copy of my hard drive burnt on a CD-R and use that to recover my HD). So to run the MP3 Car, I have a hacked up version of MacOS 8.1 (the start-up and info screens have their resources changed).

The MP3 player was a different story. There are two main MP3 players on the Mac: SoundApp and MacAmp. Both play music with the same quality, although SoundApp skips less, if ever. MacAmp sports a cool, customizable User Interface (UI), but it doesn't perform too well on slower 100Mhz computers, especially ones booting the system off a CD. But the new version of MacAmp is greatly improved and doesn't skip anymore. They both win! Right now I'm using both for my MP3 player, it just depends on which playlist I launch. One major plus plus for SoundApp tho: The author (Norman Franke) is Cool! I wrote him with some questions (By the way, "shuffle" is Command-L, not command-S like it says in the documentation) and he answered me in only about 5 min! Now that's service!

CloseView: I hit a key on my game pad and the screen is zoomed in so that I can actually read text on my little LCD screen. MacAlly INIT: allows the game pad to control the mouse and keyboard. Dilbert Break a Day calendar provides a nice Dilbert Cartoon (no pun intended) every time I start it up. Quicktime 4.0.2 is also installed so now I can watch music videos and VDC's on my player as well.
Thanks to Chris Lawson http://cc.kzoo.edu/~k98cl01/ for the correct info about the clock speed of the Mac SE.

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