I have some ideas for a few new projects in mind, but both require some sound to give them the full experience. I'm sure there are some IC or something that can do this, but I'm new to the electronics area.

I would like to be able to store 4 or more 1-2 minute MP3s and play them in any order.

Thanks, Shawn

I've found that MP3s don't look that possible with the MCU, so I'm researching WAV files. Any pointer would be appreciated.

well, you could look at my thread about audio and maybe change the program to include track switching

Would this not be an issue of the clock speed of the controller? MP3s must be decompressed/decoded, and WAVs are raw (PCM encoded) digital audio?

Check out the MP3 trigger board from Sparkfun. It holds MP3s on a microSD card and has seven physical triggers that can fire 7 diff MP3s. It can also be controlled thru serial line. $50 bucks, but should do exactly what you want to do.

RadioShack sells a module, the part number of which escapes me, that allows you to record and playback audio. It basically is a PCB with a speaker and a 9 volt connector. They cost about $11. What you could try is grabbing one and hooking the audio output of your PC to the microphone leads. Then use a transistor to apply power for the right amount of time (solder down the play button). This would probably work best if you only needed one track, once you have 4+ it gets prohibitively large and complex, not to mention expensive. If you are interested, Google for the part.

Thanks for the idea.

Another option if you are looking for less than 16 minutes of recording are the ISD series of voice recording/playback IC's. Digikey sells them. For instance the ISD4004-08MPY part is a 28 Pin dip with 8 minute recording/playback capabilities controlled via SPI. Great for interfacing to a micro-controller. If I'm not mistaken, you can also break the 8 minutes into smaller segments that can be played back individually.

They're not cheap but could be worth checking out.

Rick

You have 2 choices, either program one of the chips to decode mp3s into raw PCM, and then send it to the second chip to play. or leave the decoding part to your PC and play raw PCM (*.wav files)