MpMan MP-F70 SD card manager software
Greetings!
The job of this humble page is to present you the Java software I've written for the MpMan MP-F70, which I hope might be usefull to others.
What is an MpMan MP-F70 ?
The MpMan MP-F70 is an mp3 player with the following features:
- Store and play mp3 files.
- Use internal flash, and Secure Digital (SD) cards for storage.
- Blue backlit display
- Upgradable firmware
- Runs quite long on one AA battery
What does this software of yours do ?
Personally I quite like this mp3 player, it's robust, has quite a lot of functions, and it supports SD cards which is a big boon to me.
But it does have one rather major flaw, the interface to the PC. To sum it up:
- USB 1.0, which means -slow-, try filling a 1GB SD card over that.
- Included manager software is prone to crashing, which usually thrases the filesystem on the device as well, meaning you can start all over.
Mind you, It's still usable, and some people seem quite happy with it, but for me it was a bit of a pain :)
Now luckily the device supports SD cards, which you can take out and fill with mp3's using a common cheap USB 2.0 cardreader, which fixes all the problems mentioned before. There's only one catch tho. The device demands to have supporting files besides the mp3's themselves, which hold a playlist and information for each mp3.
This is where my software comes in. It can put mp3 files on a SD card that's accessed via a regular SD card reader, and will add those support files while doing so, which means after that you can just plug it in the MP-F70 and it'll happily play your music :)
What won't it do ?
It's important to understand that this software does not directly interface with the device, it can only prepare SD cards which have been mounted as a drive via a generic SD card reader. This also means the software cannot work with the internal memory of the device, it will only work for SD cards.
So what will this cost me ?
Here's the good part, it's free :)
This program is released under the GNU General Public License, and any third party libraries it uses are licensed under compatible licenses like the GPL, LGPL or BSD license.
Great, where can I download it ?
Click here to download :)
And then ?
As mentioned before, this software is a Java program. You will need to get the latest Java 1.4 from Sun, and install it before you can use this program. After that you just need to double click the .jar file, or if that does not work type 'java -jar MusicManagar-version.jar' in a console.
Any way to contact you ?
If you run into any problems, want to suggest a feature, find out more about this mysterious person, or just say thank you, contact me on mpmanf70@xs4all.nl.
Where to next ?
First I recommend you have a look at my other page, showing the gory insides of the player :)
You might be interested in the Linux MpMan MP-F70 support project, which helped me a lot creating this software.
Ofcourse the official MpMan site and it's European brother site might be interesting aswell.
Anything new ?
27 Apr. 2005
Added a seperate page with pictures and info on the insides of the player, go have a look! :)
Warning: it contains about 500kb of pictures, which might take a while to load on a slow connection.
26 Apr. 2005
New version of the software:
- Adding files from a folder/m3u is now done in a seperate thread, leaving the UI responsive, even though all the buttons are disabled while it is busy.
- Current file is shown in the status bar when adding files.
Also I took apart my own MpMan, to have a look inside :)
I'll post pictures of that when I have some more time, but for now the interesting details, the actual chips used inside:
- The main controller chip is SANYO LC87F5664A Microcontroller, this is a generic controller with USB1.1 port, the .hex files with firmware updates are actually compiled code for this thing.
- The audio driver is a LA4802 Headphone Stereo Power Amplifier.
Note that on the inside are two sandwiched PCB's, and I didn't dare pry them apart :) I could see at least one chip inbetween, which I think is the actual flash memory chip. If anyone ever breaks his I'd like pictures of that part too :)
Also I like to mention a helpfull hint from another user, for some silly odd reason it seems that when using the MpMan manager software, holding the power/play/pause button on the player stops those annoying disconnect errors which tend to pop up all the time.
7 Feb. 2005
New version of the software:
- Forgot to add the images for the buttons in the jar, oops ^_^.
- Updated license file.
- On 'popular' request adding a folder now adds any mp3's in subfolders recursevly aswell :).
- Added a menu option to select the Look And Feel. The program will now use whatever LAF is set as default on the system initially. Any chosen LAF is stored in a properties file in the folder pointed to by the Java user.home system property. My main reason to do this was I don't want to force a specific LAF on a user, expecially Mac OSX users who probably have a cool default LAF :)
2 Feb. 2005
Creation of this site, first (betaish) release of the software.