Turned out that my kitchen device was not satisfying. Not for the reasons suggested in comments, not because I wanted to use cheezy OS like the ones actually supported for most tablets (last time I checked, you cannot get a decent libre OS with full hardware support) for instance. But the Raspberry Pi B+ is just not powerful enough to browse Internet of these days with such a resolution. It is just too slow.

On another hand, for years, I had issues with a declining portable music player I have plugged into the car audio system (that have RCA connectors or otherwise only specific mp3 files support). Either it got stuck on some files, or it had problems to recharge. And even working best as it could, the random mode seemed to have a few songs in favor.

So, for less than 30 €, I ordered a tactile 3,5″ screen from Quimat. It work fines with Raspbian, provided you use their specific script that you can obtain via (otherwise the screen would remain white):

git clone https://github.com/goodtft/LCD-show.git

The box isn’t perfect, on one side the screen won’t be properly supported. But I do not intend to put my paws so much on it so let’s say it is acceptable for such price.

Then, to get some acceptable music player system, I went for a mpc/mpd solution, not wanting to bother with Kodi or any complicated solution that might not work or require a dedicated system other than raspbian.

So I ended up with mpd along with awesomewm and a few wrapper scripts for mpc just build playlist or send OSD notifications.

(since the screen I improved the icon set, removed the visible cursor)

I use cava to provide a visualizer. Access to the device is made through anonymous Samba. My -utils-mpc package carries such setup mostly based on mpc-monitor (check currently played, could be used to made stats or scrobbling later), mpc+notify (run mpc command with sendnotify call), mpc-playlist-build, mpc-playlist-next and few sample conffiles (awesome/rc.lua, smb.conf, redshift.conf + extra details in the README about input calibration, mpd.conf).

This Raspbian was purged of systemd, because I do want unexpected troubles, and of pulseaudio, because it causes mpd sometimes to stall and works perfectly without.

All files at stored in the main mpd music directory. Any file within a subdirectory will be treated as belonging to a specific playlist.

Plugging the USB energy input on the car relevant plug generates some odd noise: it has to be plugged to an energy bank. It seems to draw very little power.

Last step was to fill the 32GB USB key serving as storage for the music directory. Turns it was quite boring to hand pick such amount of files. So I used another quite crude script to fill it, taking randomly two thirds of available files for a given directory (a band name):

#!/bin/bash DEST=/media/user/mpdmusic if [ ! -d "$PWD/$1" ]; then echo "$PWD/$1" not found && exit; fi LIST=`find "$1" | grep -v .JPG$ | grep -v .jpg$ | grep -v .png$ | shuf` COUNT=0 for file in $LIST; do [ -d "$file" ] && continue ; COUNT=$(($COUNT+1)) done echo $COUNT THIRD=$(($COUNT / 3)) COUNT=$(($COUNT - $THIRD)) echo a third is... $COUNT # div by 3 and and skip this count if [ "$2" ]; then COUNT=$2; fi echo but... $COUNT for file in $LIST; do if [ "$COUNT" -lt 0 ]; then exit ; fi [ -d "$file" ] && continue ; #echo $COUNT $file COUNT=$(($COUNT - 1)) cp -v "$file" $DEST/`basename "$file"` done

Quite crude indeed. mpc-monitor could be used to make stats to, in the end, remove unwanted out. But for now it should properly replace dying mp3/ogg player that you have no control over beside the power-off and play button.

Sure, maybe there are cool mp3/ogg/whatever players out there that could come for cheaper. Not really the point, I enjoy having full control over this one, even if I am not using more than 0,001% of this power. And, BTW, I intend, for another pre-electronics vehicule, to get a proper setup with music player and GPS so any experience in this regard is worth it.