[yanick_viens]

That may sound odd but is the MP3 unit different than the CD unit ?

Said otherwise, could we hack the CD unit so that it can read MP3 ?

Considering the costs of producing a CD only unit and a CD/MP3 unit, not sure they are that different ...

 

[bluntman]

The mechanisms should be similar but you'll need some sort of software/ICs that will allow the CD unit to read MP3 information.

 

[bknauss]

Its fairly complicated to get a CD player to read MP3s. I've had a hard time finding ICs that would decode MP3s. There was a thread on diyaudio.com a while ago about building a standalone CD unit, but it seemed to have died out. If anyone wants to attempt it, I do have some links that might help.

 

[Kazbaeden]

Yeah, the only difference between the two is integrated codec decoding.