Lessons Learned:

Lesson One: 

For those contemplating this type of project in the future, please carefully consider some comments from Hale Landis of ATA-ATAPI.com:

 

So you want to build an MP3 player that uses an ATAPI CD-ROM drive as the data storage device?

First, you should find a different project!

Second, you should look [at] all the projects just like this [one] that have been implemented by hundreds of people around the world [4].

 

Lesson Two:

Don't fry your kit, hard drives, personal computers and/or body parts in the process of the project. 

 

Figure 1 Varying Types of Smoke Emitting Hardware

Lesson Three:

Don't write your firmware in assembly code.  If it is written in C, there is a wider variety of available programming tools to aid in the debugging and coding.

 

Lesson Four:

You need a really good understanding of the ATA and ATAPI interfaces.  In order to speak "ATAPI," a casual perusal of the ATA/ATAPI-4 standard is not sufficient to gain adequate proficiency. 

 

Lesson Five: 

The player architecture needs to be flexible in order to support the myriad of storage media used by ATAPI devices.  For instance, most CD-ROMs adhere to the ISO-9660 format and don't come with a native FAT32 file system.  On the other hand, an Iomega zip disk, while also ATAPI based, comes FAT-32 ready.

 

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