Feature idea: enable mp3 playback from USB mass storage

[dnquark]

Imagine this: you hook up a U2 or i5 to an external USB hard drive. It recognizes the drive and allows you to havigate through its directory structure and play mp3s. Perhaps even offer the capability to transfer songs to the player. You'd have to externally power the drive, but such a feature would be super handy in many cases!


Can't be too hard to implement, either: for $30 Walmart sells this thing: it plugs into your car cig lighter, you attach an external hard drive, pen drive/whatever holding mp3 files by USB, and it will allow you to navigate through the folders on the ext storage and beam the music via FM to the car stereo.

Sorry if it's been discussed here before.

--l

[hwaide]

Its called usb on the go and I think Iaudio will implement it in the M5s...
I think there vill be hardware issues implementing it on oyher players...

[jw0613]

aren't most of the USB hard drives powered by the USB port ?
wait.. maybe not.. but if not.. u have to plug it in.. and if u are gonna do that, might as well plug it in to computer's HD.. if it's portable.. it would be ok.. but then it would be easier to get hd based player.. like.. M3.. it can be used as USB mass storage too.

[dnquark]

Yeah, you'd have to plug the external drive into the wall socket, so it wouldn't be a truly portable solution, but here are some scenarios where it would still come in handy:

1) one has to spend a week or more away from their computer with no other computer readily available (ok, unlikely, but let's imagine :)

2) I DJ for the univ. swing club, and sometimes I'm too lazy to lug my computer around, so I DJ off my U2, which of course limits me a lot. If I could get the U2 to play things off the external hard drive, that would give me all my music, with no need to carry a computer.

I'm pretty sure this could be implemented in firmware (USB communcation/transfers are pretty straightforward)... But yeah, the fact that you have to plug into the wall would make it impractical for most ppl, so cowon probably won't implement it.

[Garrison]

hmm how much power does it take to power a thumb drive? I think it is possible to power it with your player. Might drain a lot of batt though