First step is to solder the wave shield together. There is already a great tutorial from Adafruit for soldering it together. If you are going to assembling this inside of the 3D printed box, you will have to leave off the black volume control knob. You can still control the volume by twisting the potentiometer, it will just be slightly less convenient.



In order to program the wave shield you'll need to download the WaveHC library and put it in the libraries folder within the Arduino program files.



Audio files need to be converted into 22KHz, 16-bit, mono .wav files. If you don't know how to do this, follow this tutorial using either iTunes or Audacity.



My experience with the Wave shield is that it can be fickle. I highly recommend loading a formatted song onto the SD card and testing out this shield with this example. This example should automatically search for any properly formated wave files on the SD card and play the songs all the way through. If it doesn't start playing, check the serial monitor to see what error messages you are getting. If a song starts playing, you are good to go!