Control IDE CR ROM Drive to play CD Audio

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jamesbruton

Member
Most old PC CD ROM drives (and some new ones) would play CD Audio tracks an audio CD that was inserted with only power applied to them - and no PC connected. This was done using the buttons on the front for play/next track etc, and the audio would come out of a headphone jack on the front, or from the CD Audio connector on the back...

Can anyone think of a simple way to control the CD Audio playing functionality of an old CD ROM drive from a Picaxe, somehow through the IDE connector?. I'm not interested in decoding the audio through the IDE interface, or decoding mp3s on the disc etc - just controlling the play / pause / stop / track select functions for playing CD Audio (such as commercial audio CDs).

I think I saw a cpmmercial module that did this once but I can't remember where or find it anywhere... some sort of third party board that connects to the IDE connector and has a simple protocol / logic level inputs to control the CD audio functions of the drive?

This is for a sound installation which will be in public - so it has to be fairly low cost incase someone pinches it, hence wanting to use an old CD ROM drive (otherwise it's the vmusic module I guess). It must have functionality to select different tracks and play/stop controlled by a Picaxe somehow.

thanks!
 
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ylp88

Senior Member
Not using a PICAXE, but Silicon Chip recently had an article doing this with an AVR, I think. Better still, I believe that it is also available as a kit though Jaycar.

http://www.siliconchip.com.au/cms/A_109528/article.html

You might be able to get some ideas from that.

Aside, have you considered trying to use a PICAXE to override/control the buttons that exist on the front of some CD drives. Most newer drives (DVD/burner) only seem to have an eject button (well, mine do), but my older ones (plain CD drives) also have buttons to skip to the next track and play/pause the playback. Limited functionality, but it would probably be much easier than trying to implement an simple ATAPI interface.

ylp88
 
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jamesbruton

Member
Mine has play and skip forward only on it, but I'll be putting together a set of about 50 different tracks on a CDR, so going to track 49 and then track 41 afterwards is going to be tricky (but of course not impossible by skipping another 40 odd times)...

It would just be nice to be able to select tracks at random, but the cost may be prohibitive, I found this for instance:

http://www.kitstream.com/

...but the Vmusic module is cheaper.
 
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hippy

hippy

Technical Support
Staff member
This is a project I've been thinking of but have no intent to do it, so it would be great if someone did it and published it as a project.

I've quite a few CD drives in external boxes with mains PSU but no Play buttons. Would be nice to turn them into CD music players.

What's needed is an IDE interface ( 16 bi-directional lines of data, 3 address lines, plus read, write and power ), a basic driver plus code to handle ATAPI commands. The hardware and basic driver should be fairly straight forward. I've no experience with ATAPI but it looks fairly simple -

http://www.pjrc.com/mp3/gallery/cs580/ata_atapi.html

Just a program to start the CD playing when inserted would be a good start.

PS : Is there anyway to create a DVD music player in the same way ( audio out the analogue connector ) allowing a "music CD" of 4.7GB ?
 
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wbryan

New Member
Milford Instruments (UK) has a commercial board that will drive an ATAPI/IDE CD-ROM for audio: http://www.milinst.com/

On a complete aside, I notice they've also started stocking some of the nice 4D Systems displays as well.

Will
 
J

jamesbruton

Member
The Milford Instruments one is probably what I saw/remembered from some time ago - although it's still pretty pricey for me. I only really need to build the cheapest sound playback device so the Vmusic2 looks like the best so far unless anyone has another idea. It would just be a shame to have it 'go missing'...

I was hoping someone had made a small module with a single PIC chip that could send the right ATAPI/IDE commands to the CD ROM drive from some sort of Picaxe-compatible input.
 
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