how's this for a long shot, anyone know if there's a way to play mp3's to a phoneline using a modem? say i want to ring someone and play them a track, ratehr than hold the phone to a stereo, i wanna be able to play it straight down the line... possible?

Yes it is, actually, but I think it's going to be more difficult using a modem than it would to buy a crappy old phone and soldering iron.

My brother did this many, many moons ago (a long time before mp3 was even a twinkle). Basically, if you get an old phone, open the mouth-piece and disconnect the 'microphone' (I think phone techies call it a transducer). You can then simply connect the two wires from a headphone jack to the two wires in the phone and hey-presto you can play music down the line.

Be warned, though, you will have to play around with you outputs to get it to sound right. Almost anything above 11K 8Bit will sound way too bassy.

Also, there are some Win programs around that will allow your machine to act as an answer phone. Obviously, answerphones have 'messages' to be played back down the line, so if you can find some Linux program of this ilk (I believe it was actually a fax program), you might be able to play around with it to do you phone-music aswell.

Personally, though, I'd go for the former idea, it will ultimately be easier. Also, if you connected to ear-piece to the microphone input on your soundcard, you could even set up a menu system for songs. Now that would be good. BTW, you'd have to give us all your phone no. so that we could try it.

actually i did manage to getinfo on a few linux answering machines using vgetty all other vaious home hacked things...

thought abuot just using the phone, but i always presumed it would be more comlpex than that, encoding and all, but then from the mic there's nothign to go wrong...

soldering kicks ass, i'm making a linux oscilloscope for my degree, should be cool, super fast with a cute gtk ui. too big to solder tho! get you wirewrp the whole thing with a cool gun/drill type thing, so i don't get blister from a smelly iron. Just off to nui to pick my some FIFO and ADC chips... so cool, my uni lets me spend al the cash i want on chips, withotu asknig questions!

one thign similar to that is a thign i keep stumbling over online, about playing music through the parallel port, just using a resistor tree across the datapins... do like the phone hack idea tho....

oh, and my phone number is 0891 505050 :-)

Did you say oscilloscope?

I have been looking for a linux scope program, they are available for windows but I have not found one for linux...

The windows ones are very expensive.

there's a few around, like xscope, but i'm designing it specifically for my uni. Going for 25Mhz dual analog sampling, should be cool, if i can get it right...

one really good scope is at www.metachip.com. OpenSource Hardware rocks! Most of my ideas seem to come from there... i think there's a linux client for it.. if not.. write one!

CooL

Thanks, I will check it out

There is a way to use a sound card, but it is only 20kHz bandwidth.

yeah, there's a fair few midi in scopes around, but the bandwidth is pretty pants yeah. I'm going over parallel as i can get 2mbps over it at max, and at a really low level interface, got scared of usb... far to complex to understand on top of everything else...

This is one of the many things I love about this BB. Who would have thought of sending sound through your modem, just to be able to play mp3's to your friends over the phone?

It's amazing the things the users on this board are into...

well the deal was, IS, that i listen to Talk Sport loads, on teh radio in lil old england, and there's a show on there where ppl ring in a basically just make farty noises for 3 hours, and whener people play samples or whetever over the phone it always sounds absolutely awful and annoying, so i thought if i wanted to do that then i'd make it sound decent....

Always good to see innovation being put to good use .

You could also use it for the Frosties thing (do a 'growl' down the phone and potentially win £1000 English).