A Versatile Arduino MP3 File Player…

It is pretty simple to build a simple mp3 audio player using the Stream API of my Arduino Audio Tools library:

• A SD file is a subclass of an Arduino Stream, so all you need to do is to copy from the file to the desired output stream.
• when we use the EncodedAudioStream as output, we can support different audio formats
• we can add a status flag to halt and continue the processing
• Finally we need to add some logic which handles the end of file to automatically process the next file
• On top of that it is rather easy to add volume control and meta data support.

In order to simplify the usage of my library even more, I decided to provide this functionality as well in a separate class and to prove the point: The AudioPlayer class took only 120 lines of code to implement!

The AudioPlayer supports

• multiple processor architectures
• multiple audio data sources (SD, URL, callbacks)
• different Output Scenarios (I2S, PWM, A2DP etc). Just pass the desired output stream object to the constructor.
• different Decoders for MP3, AAC, WAV. Just pass the desired decoder object to the constructor.
• Volume Control (by calling player.setVolume())
• Stopping and Resuming the processing (by calling player.stop() and player.play())
• You can move to the next file by calling player.next();
• support for Metadata

Dependencies

The sketch is using the following dependencies:

• https://github.com/pschatzmann/arduino-audio-tools
• https://github.com/pschatzmann/arduino-libhelix
• https://github.com/greiman/SdFat

Setup

Install the necessary libraries. Before you start double check your settings in the AudioConfig.h of the arduino-audio-tools project.

A Basic Sketch

The following Arduino Sketch demonstrates how to implement an MP3 Player: which gets the data from a SD drive and provides the audio as analog output: The AudioSourceSdFat class builds on the SdFat Library from Bill Greiman which provides FAT16/FAT32 and exFAT support with long filenames.

#include "AudioTools.h"
#include "AudioTools/AudioCodecs/CodecMP3Helix.h"

const char *startFilePath="/";
const char* ext="mp3";
AudioSourceSdFat source(startFilePath, ext);
AnalogAudioStream out;
MP3DecoderHelix decoder;
AudioPlayer player(source, out, decoder);

// Arduino setup
void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200);
  AudioLogger::instance().begin(Serial, AudioLogger::Info);

  // setup output
  auto cfg = out.defaultConfig();
  out.begin(cfg);

  // setup player
  player.begin();
}

// Arduino loop
void loop() {
  player.copy();
}

As you can see, this approach has quite some flexibility: if you want to use I2S as output just replace the AnalogAudioStream with I2SStream. If you want to process another file format, just replace the Decoder implementation and if you want to get the audio data from a different source, just replace use a different AudioSource..

Extending the Functionality

With just a few more lines we can add the support for metadata and the filtering of files by name:

#include "AudioTools.h"
#include "AudioCodecs/CodecMP3Helix.h"

const char *startFilePath="/";
const char* ext="mp3";
AudioSourceSdFat source(startFilePath, ext);
AnalogAudioStream out;
MP3DecoderHelix decoder;
AudioPlayer player(source, out, decoder);

// metadata callback
void printMetaData(MetaDataType type, const char* str, int len){
  Serial.print("==> ");
  Serial.print(MetaDataTypeStr[type]);
  Serial.print(": ");
  Serial.println(str);
}

// Arduino setup
void setup() {
  Serial.begin(115200);
  AudioLogger::instance().begin(Serial, AudioLogger::Info);

  // setup output
  auto cfg = out.defaultConfig();
  out.begin(cfg);

  // setup player
  source.setFileFilter("*Bob Dylan*");
  player.setCallbackMetadata(printMetaData);
  player.begin();
}

// Arduino loop
void loop() {
  player.copy();
}

SD Card

Here is the information how to wire the SD card to the ESP32

The Output

On the ESP32 the analog output is available on GPIO25 (Channel 1) and GPIO26 (Channel 2).

You can use a piezo electric element or connect some earphones:

Using PlatformIO

You can also implement this sketch in PlatformIO. This has the advantage, that the dependencies get installed automatically. Just use the following platform.ini file:

[platformio]
description = Audio MP3 Player
default_envs = esp32dev

[env:esp32dev]
platform = espressif32
board = esp32dev
framework = arduino
lib_deps = https://github.com/pschatzmann/arduino-audio-tools, https://github.com/pschatzmann/arduino-libhelix, https://github.com/greiman/SdFat
build_flags = -DCORE_DEBUG_LEVEL=5 -Wno-unused-variable -Wno-unused-but-set-variable -Wno-unused-function -Wno-format-extra-args 
monitor_speed = 115200

Source code

You can find the source code for this and other audio player examples on Github.