Garage Tunes

I don't spend an inordinate of time in the garage, but it's nice to have some music when working on projects out there. Unfortunately the only garage-suitable music playing device I could round up was an ancient boom box with radio, cassette and CD player. I could use an mp3 player, but I'd rather not for safety reasons. The thought of not being able to hear a power saw - or my own screams as I remove a digit - above a Hendrix guitar solo is disconcerting. Then it occurred to me to try to stream tunes from our network attached storage device (NAS) and its built-in Firefly music server.

The NAS is basically a small computer with embedded Intel Atom microprocessor, two mirrored hard drives, and embedded Linux BusyBox operating system. The music server is compatible with Apple iTunes, Windows Media Player 12 and other media players.

Any PC in the house can attach to the music server over the local area network and play songs, albums and playlists. The music can be searched and sorted, and appears to be local to the PC.

A quick survey of extra computers and other network devices brought to light an old PDA that hasn't been used for years. It's a Toshiba E740 with built-in 11 megabit per second 802.11b. By today’s standards it’s old and slow. It runs early versions of Windows CE, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player. It was quite slow even for its day.

But it's wireless and it did connect to the network. Unforunately locating the music shared folder was troublesome, and getting Windows Media Player to locate the music server was impossible.

Fortunately there still is a lot of software available even for older operating systems, and I was able to locate MortPlayer, a free PocketPC music player. After a painless installation MortPlayer quickly found the NAS and the music shared folder, but not the music server. I attached a pair of A/C powered PC speakers to the headphone jack on the PDA and voilà music to my ears.

With MortPlayer I have to navigate through the album within artist directory structure on the NAS and play one album at a time. It would be nice if it would play an artist's entire collection shuffled, but I'm not complaining, it's free and it works. As for playlists, MortPlayer does not play m3u playlists, but it does play Windows Media Player 12 playlists and I have a few of them on the server.

So that’s where it ends for now. Until I put a PC with iTunes or Windows 7 in the garage, a free music player on an old but reliable PDA with PC speakers will serve up my Garage Tunes.