I got a used IBM Thinkpad 365XD w/ a broken screen and a DC-to-DC converter to run in my car back in '99. I loaded Slackware on it and set it up to mount the root filesystem readonly (so the unit could be hard powered-down whenever). I wrote a little Perl init script to mount the CD-ROM drive if a media was present and do rudimentary filesystem navigation.I used the Festival speech synthesis package reading filenames from the disk.
I burned my MP3s to discs in a format Artist / Album / Song so I could use my rudimentary speech UI to navigate up and down the directory hierarchy and play the selected item (be it a single MP3 file, or a directory, which would get played recursively).
I'd leave the unit open on the passenger seat and reach over to run the UI without looking at it. I can still remember how Festival's "accent" colored the reading of the names and titles.
I put the unit out to pasture when I got a flash-based player w/ reasonable capacity.
I burned my MP3s to discs in a format Artist / Album / Song so I could use my rudimentary speech UI to navigate up and down the directory hierarchy and play the selected item (be it a single MP3 file, or a directory, which would get played recursively).
I'd leave the unit open on the passenger seat and reach over to run the UI without looking at it. I can still remember how Festival's "accent" colored the reading of the names and titles.
I put the unit out to pasture when I got a flash-based player w/ reasonable capacity.