On Sat, Jan 14, 2012, <[email protected]> wrote: > This is not a Linux question and may not even be a computer question, but > I think I will get better opinions here than anywhere else I know.
so let's make it a linux question! =) > What is the least expensive longterm (1-3 years) manner to continuously > play background music or sound? > I want to set the "what ever" up to repeatedly play the same 40 minutes > over and over continuously with no or very little human intervention after > the initial set up. what are you playing it on? a phone line? headphones? a PA system at a mall? what requirements are there? how small should the solution be? how much are you concerned or willing to pay to ensure that it never fails? if it does fail, will it be somewhere you can tell someone to hit a reset switch easily (ie not in the ceiling or a remote location)? do you need to be able to update the sound ever? does it need a physical volume control? seems like the cheapest with no other special requirements would be just to find a free old computer from craigslist or maybe one that's too wimpy for freegeek's standards but would be overkill for looping sound (as would be anything that runs linux and has an audio out). install read-only filesystems & a stripped down linux setup to do nothing but loop the track on repeat at boot so it survives power failures. i used to work at a place that had a 386 laptop playing its hold music (closed, sitting in the phone closet, plugged in) for nearly 10 years straight. if i were doing it, i'd maybe go for simplest & out of the box "just works" factor and deprioritize linux and could probably find (for free) an old hardware mp3 player with 64MB or other laughably-small-by-today's-standards storage that runs off of a wall wart instead of batteries and have it loop an mp3. i used to own more than one of those. heck, i still have one of those though it has a hard drive so it would suck more power than one without spinning disk. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
