Make a portable harddrive MP3 player not portable?

[enclosure]

My idea: take an old HD-based MP3 player (iPod, Archos, Zen, whatever), and wire it up to my USB 2.0 external drive enclosure, so I can play the music from the big drive w/o having to buy a 40GB mp3 player, or set up a dedicated computer just to run iTunes.

Anybody know if this is possible, or have a better idea?

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

I don't remember ever reading about someone doing this... do you have a plan on how to get the mp3 player to access the HDD.... I know this is pretty much the only issue this this as long as you can get power to the hard drive.

Are you planning on taking apart the mp3 player and then trying to adapt the connection it has with the mp3 harddrive to the IDE interface on the hard drive? Or do you have some idea on how to get it use the USB (I don't know how you'd do that)?

 

[enclosure]

No plan yet... hoping someone here will have an idea. I'd originally thought about trying to just adapt the mp3 player's connection to the drive's IDE interface, but then I realized that to do this, I'd have to take the drive out of the enclosure every time, which makes the solution too inconvenient.

So it would have to connect via USB... somehow. Another possibility would be to find a stereo receiver with a built in USB interface, but I've never heard of one.

 

[thecrecarc]

buy a prtable harddrive mp3 player.
open it
take the hardrive out
but ur protable hardrive in
done

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

why would you have to take it out of the enclosure? I imagined you'd have the drive in the enclosure so it would have power, but you'd mod it so that it had an ide cable coming out of it somehow... and then the mp3 player would have the case off or something with an adapter in the back that you would plug into the cable coming out of the external enclosure.

Looking back at the dell dj that I have, it doesn't seem like it would be impossible...

what kind of player do you have now?

 

[enclosure]

> you'd mod it so that it had an ide cable coming out of it somehow

Hadn't thought of that. Not sure if my aluminum-cutting skills are that good, but it's worth a try.

Don't actually have a portably player yet -- figured I'd get one on ebay once I knew which kind would work.

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

if you haven't bought anything yet... and you'd have to buy hdd player to do this, i don't know if it would be worth the trouble. i thought you were trying to do this so you wouldn't have to buy anything. are small capacity hdd mp3 players really cheap on ebay or something?

EDIT: oh, and if you do this, you're probably going to have to have the player format that drive so it can access the data on it.... maybe not though, since i've never done anything like this before, but it seems like the player would have to format the drive and when it did that, you would lose all the songs on the drive you have now.

and thecrecarc, are you saying there are products like external hard drive enclosures but can act as an mp3 player? I don't think I've ever seen one, but if I'm understanding that correctly, that's exactly what we need here... I searched a little but didn't come up with anything right away, should we be searching for a specific name?

 

[YOyoYOhowsDAjello]

Here's something that's kind of on the right track for this Vosonic

it's a multimedia player that you can add a laptop harddrive to... looks like all their products are based off notebook sized drives though

 

[enclosure]

Yeah! That's really close. I wonder how hard it would be to jam an extender cable into it, and plug it into my external drive. Or better yet, plug an IDE -> USB converter into it, then connect it to any USB drive. Thanks for the tip.

EDIT: YOyoYOhowsDAjello, the reason I want to do this is that I've already got a drive with all my music on it. I want to just have one copy of everything that I can plug into a desktop, a laptop, or my stereo -- I'd rather not go the route of having multiple devices for each use, and multiple copies of everything.

 

[ed21x]

Originally posted by: thecrecarc
buy a prtable harddrive mp3 player.
open it
take the hardrive out
but ur protable hardrive in
done

they don't use the same size HD's-- I believe most tiny HD players use 1.8'' or smaller platters while regular HD's use quite large ones. There are quite a few HD'based mp3 players on the market that have the capability to access the memory of other devices via USB, but it is usually used in swapping out pictures from digital cameras. Try looking into players that have built in photoviewers.

 

[Bassyhead]

Originally posted by: enclosure
Yeah! That's really close. I wonder how hard it would be to jam an extender cable into it, and plug it into my external drive. Or better yet, plug an IDE -> USB converter into it, then connect it to any USB drive. Thanks for the tip.

EDIT: YOyoYOhowsDAjello, the reason I want to do this is that I've already got a drive with all my music on it. I want to just have one copy of everything that I can plug into a desktop, a laptop, or my stereo -- I'd rather not go the route of having multiple devices for each use, and multiple copies of everything.

Is it possible to store the music on your PC and have a network set up to it? There are network devices that you plug into your stereo that play MP3s from a network location. Not sure if they support other formats. You could also use the network to get the music onto your laptop.

 

[vailr]

D-Link Wireless Media Player, Model DSM-320

 

[enclosure]

Bassyhead --

The computer's a laptop -- it's not always in the same place as the drive, so I can't leave it on as a network server.