MP3 Radio
The Truly Mobile & Wireless Music Solution
Michael Backman, Richard Bannon
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University of Washington, Seattle, WA
{mbackman, rbannon}@cs.washington.edu
Abstract
In the last few years, MP3 players have made it
possible to take your whole music collection with
you anywhere. Despite this convenience, you
are still limited to listening to your music through
headphones. MP3 Radio makes use of Intel’s
Personal Server and newly developed Slappy
card, along with a Bluetooth enabled cell phone,
allowing you to listen to your music on any
stereo with an FM tuner. MP3 Radio is
designed to be a ubiquitous music device that is
always on. The device is, conveniently,
controlled with a cell phone, which most
everyone already carries with them everywhere.
The cell phone interface provides lets the user
browse through their music and create play lists,
similar to a typical MP3 player. Our
implementation does provide the convenience of
an MP3 player as well as the added benefit of
being able to listen to it on a regular stereo
anywhere. The main goals of MP3 Radio were
portability and ease of use. As you will see in
this paper, we were able to achieve both of
these goals. This project also shows the
practicality of Bluetooth enabled cell phones in
controlling other Bluetooth devices. Finally, we
see that a device such as Intel’s Personal
Server can be a powerful mobile device when
used in conjunction with other mobile devices.
1. Introduction
Digital music in the form of MP3 files has
exploded in popularity the last few years. Today
it is possible to store your whole music collection
on an MP3 player the size of a deck of cards
and take it with you anywhere. MP3 players are
still limited in one facet: you are limited to
listening to your music through headphones.
You can buy special cables which make it
possible to connect an MP3 player to a regular
stereo. This helps to solve the headphone
problem, although it is a limited solution. You
still have to pack around cables with you if you
want to listen to your MP3 music on different
stereos. Also, many of these wire kits don’t
allow you to connect your MP3 player to a car
stereo. We are living in the wireless age and for
that reason, a solution should exist to this
problem which doesn’t involve wires and that
works on any stereo. This is exactly what we
had in mind in designing MP3 Radio. Before we
go into what MP3 Radio is, we will give a typical
scenario describing how someone might use it.
Joe is a typical MP3 radio user. After he
purchases the kit, he loads his entire collection
of music onto the MP3 radio server using a
standard 802.11 wireless networking connection.
Joe then installs the MP3 radio client software
onto his Bluetooth enabled cell phone. Once he
finishes these two tasks, he is ready to begin
using his MP3 Radio. He opens the MP3 Radio
application on his phone. The phone
automatically searches for other Bluetooth
devices within range of his phone. The MP3
Radio server shows up in a selection dialog
along with his laptop, which is also within range.
Next, Joe selects the MP3 Radio device and a
dialog which says, “Connecting…” pops up
momentarily. The MP3 Radio client application
starts in the “Browse” view and Joe can see that
the application is receiving details of his music
application from the MP3 Radio server. After a
few seconds, an alphabetical list of, first folders,
then music files is displayed on the phone. He
can scroll down the list and using the up and
down key on the phone. When Joe hits enter on
a folder, the phone application displays the
contents of that folder. Joe also sees that the
“Option” key has a number of commands in it
which allow him to add songs to his current play
list and play songs directly. Joe spends some
time creating a play list of the songs that he
wants to listen to. He then navigates to the
“Playlist” view and sees that he can save his
current play list and load play lists that are
already saved. Joe is ready to listen to music on
his MP3 Radio.
The first thing Joe does is plugs his headphones
into the MP3 Radio server. Joe switches the
MP3 radio application to the “Player” view. He
sees that from within this view he can control the
playback of his music. He chooses the “Shuffle”
command and then hits “Play.” His headphones
come to life, playing one of his favorite songs.
After playing around a little, Joe is convinced
that his MP3 Radio has all of the functionality of
his old MP3 player. Joe is pleased that he isn’t
loosing any functionality with his new music
player. Now it’s time to test out the feature
which persuaded him to buy MP3 Radio:
broadcasting his music over FM radio.
Joe unplugs his headphones and places the
MP3 Radio server in his briefcase. Next, he
walks into his living room and turns his stereo on
and dials in 88.7 MHz on the FM tuner. Sure
enough, the same song that he was just listening
to with his headphones comes to life on his
home stereo. It’s almost time for Joe to head off
to work so Joe decides to make a new play list
of his favorite driving music.
When Joe gets into his car, he turns on the
stereo and tunes into 88.7 MHz. Before he pulls
out of his driveway, he pulls out his phone and
opens up the MP3 Radio application. He
navigates to the “Playlist” view, loads his driving
play list and then goes to the “Player” view and
hits play. The car stereo starts playing his
driving music. The music sounds particularly
good in his car because he has a several-
thousand dollar car stereo. When Joe gets to
work, he just leaves his MP3 Radio going. In his
office, Joe turns on his little table-top stereo and
tunes in the correct FM station. Again, the
stereo comes to life with his driving music.
Joe is really pleased with his new MP3 Radio.
He can take his music with him and listen to it
anywhere without having to pack around a
bunch of cables. He usually leaves his MP3
server in his brief case and just forgets about it.
He only needs to charge the device once every
two or three days. Joe especially likes the cell
phone control. He is used to having his cell
phone with him and he is happy that he doesn’t
have to carry a bulky MP3 player on his person
to listen to his music anywhere.
MP3 radio uses three radio protocols to achieve
its completely wireless functionality. The first is
used to transfer music files to the MP3 Radio
server and operates with a standard Wi-Fi radio.
The second radio allows the client application
running on the cell phone to communicate with
the server application running on the MP3 Radio
server. This radio uses the Bluetooth protocol.
Lastly, the music is broadcast with an FM radio
so that any stereo equipped with an FM radio
can tune in and listen.
The most challenging aspect of the design of
MP3 Radio was implementing the
communication between the server and the
client using the Bluetooth protocol stack. The
MP3 Radio server runs Linux for an operating
system and the phone application is designed to
run on cell phones running Symbian OS. Much
of the difficulty in implementing the Bluetooth
communication was introduced because the two
devices are running different operating systems.
Another challenge was simply designing
applications using the Nokia Series 60 SDK,
which are the development tools that are
required to write applications for the Symbian
cell phone. The Nokia Series 60 SDK is
designed to plug into a third party development
environment. The SDK is compatible with
several common development environments
including: Visual Studio, Borland C++Builder and
Metrowerks CodeWarrior. Initially, the only
development environment that we could get to
correctly compile a C++ program into a Symbian
Installation System (SIS) file, which is the type of
file that applications are archived into for
installation on the Symbian OS phone, was
Borland C++BuilderX. Borland’s development
environment was great except that the compiler
gave horrendously vague error messages, which
made development nearly impossible except in
extremely small steps. After struggling with this
long enough, we decided to try to get the SDK to
plug into a different development environment.
Eventually, we were able to get the SDK working
semi-correctly with Metrowerks CodeWarrior
development environment. We still had to rely
on Borlands C++BuilderX to actually build the
(SIS) file. CodeWarrior provided us with much
more descriptive error messages so we were
able to make much better progress in designing
the client application for the cell phone.
3. Related Work
Mp3 players have become popular in the last
years. Units are getting smaller and cheaper
and song storage is growing. These players,
such as the extremely successful iPod, are
focused around portability, taking the market
from older portable media players such as the
CD, minidisk, and cassette.
Mp3 Radio expands on this idea by introducing
remote access and broadcasting to the portable
music market. The other players that have
come out all require the unit to be listened to on
headphones or by plugging into some other
system. The controls are all still on the unit
since it is designed to be used on the person.
Mp3 Radio allows the user to leave the unit by
any FM receiver, or even keep it in a pocket.
There are no wires needed to connect to the
receiver and no need to control playback with
buttons on the unit. All controls are done with a
cell phone.
There is one popular project called Bemused [1]
that is very similar to ours. Bemused is an open
source project that was created, just as ours, to
control a music collection from a cell phone over
Bluetooth. They are based off of the series 60
phone models running Symbian OS. The
difference is on the server end. Bemused was
written to interface with everyday PCs,
controlling popular music playback programs
such as Winamp [2] or Windows Media Player.
[3] Mp3 Radio uses Intel’s Personal Server,
which doesn’t have the functionality of a regular
PC. The biggest problem is that it has no
floating point math support, which most Mp3
decoders use. A fixed point solution had to be
found. The Bemused server is also written to be
usable on many platforms, while Mp3 Radio
needs only to be targeted to the Personal
Server.
Bemused, while feature rich and compatible,
was too much for an application such as ours.
What we needed was something that would run
fast and not carry the extra weight of features
and overhead that came with Bemused. The
floating point decoder alone was enough to put
the Bemused project out of our reach, although it
maintained to be a large inspiration for our
project.
The Bemused user interface is almost identical
to the popular Winamp media player. The
graphical skins that can be loaded into Bemused
are basically ports from Winamp skins. Mp3
Radio currently has no such fancy interface, only
a simple list driven one much more like the iPod.
The Mp3 Radio Server was built from scratch.
Madplay was chosen to be the Mp3 decoder,
and integrated into the application. All we
needed to do was receive messages from the
phone and process them accordingly. No large
overhead was needed, just a simple message
handler and the decoder. The complexity of
Bemused just wasn’t necessary.
4. Approach
The Mp3 Radio project was developed in three
large chunks. The user interface had to be
designed on the Nokia phone and created to
communicate with the personal server.
Secondly, the Bluetooth connection itself had to
be implemented and data streamed across.
Thirdly, the personal server had handle Mp3
playback which was controlled via the messages
received on Bluetooth.
The first part we created was the Mp3 aspect.
The Slappy audio card hooked up to the
personal server could handle the sound output
and FM broadcast, but it needed .wav files to do
so. An Mp3 decoder was needed to convert files
from .mp3 to .wav. We looked for compatible
decoders, but most decoders out there run on
floating point algorithms. Unfortunately, our
personal server has no floating point support, so
a fixed point decoder was needed. After much
searching, we found the perfect decoder.
Madplay is a command line based Mp3 player
used on UNIX systems. It uses fixed point
algorithms and we could modify it to our own
design because the project is open source. The
next step was to integrate Bluetooth to the
decoder. We first created a separate Bluetooth
communication program and verified its
operation, and then put the two together. We
replaced Madplay’s keyboard input with the
Bluetooth message pump. Messages coming
from the phone would now simply emulate the
regular keyboard commands of Madplay.
When this was done, the Bluetooth data pipe
was created. Bluetooth was chosen as a
medium mostly because that is what is readily
available on cell phones. However, Bluetooth
was also designed for close proximity wireless
networking, which is exactly what we needed.
Most of our time on this part of the project was
spent learning how to use the Bluetooth protocol
stack. Once we got things running, it was simply
a matter of deciding on messages to be sent
across and integrating with the phone and
decoder.
Finally, we tackled the phone user interface.
The phone we chose to use was the Nokia 6600.
Our main requirement for the phone was that it
had a Bluetooth interface. The 6600 was
chosen because there were others here who
had already done some development work with
the phone so we would have someone to talk to
if we had any problems.
The user interface design was modeled loosely
after the iPod interface. A basic phone
application was created to handle the device
discovery and connection. Then a list of the
usual playback commands are implemented to
list songs, play, stop, or skip to the next or
previous song. When a command is selected, a
message is sent across the Bluetooth
connection to the server.
Putting the three pieces together, we have a
phone interface which efficiently talks to the
personal server and has control over all basic
music playback functions.
5. Implementation
Our largest obstacle in the project was
Bluetooth. The protocol stack is very complex
and figuring out how it all worked was quite a
task. Dealing with connecting Bluetooth across
two different operating systems only made
matters worse. The personal server runs Linux,
which handles Bluetooth fairly well once things
get going. The phone was much more
complicated.
[Richard, check out what I’m saying here…]
The Symbian OS required many more new
classes and libraries to get Bluetooth working.
The poor development environments made this
task even harder with vague error messages
and uninformative warnings. We eventually
switched the phone code over to C++ just
because we weren’t getting anywhere with a
Java implementation and the development
environment was a bit better. There weren’t
really any tradeoffs to this decision, except a
minor setback in progress, but that was quickly
made up in the more efficient work we could do
with C++. The phone, however, continues to
plague us with problems whenever trying to
develop something on it.
The personal server was also a large source of
headaches. Connecting applications over
Bluetooth worked every 3rd or 4th time we would
try, or the server would randomly lose power, or
reset. Our programs connect via Bluetooth just
fine to other systems, so we believe the
Bluetooth hardware on the server itself may be a
bit buggy. These problems with the server
severely slowed development progress
throughout the project.
6. Evaluation
We evaluated the Mp3 radio in 3 categories:
program robustness and stability, usability, and
music quality.
We wanted the system to run smoothly. The
server shouldn’t crash, the phone shouldn’t get
hung up on its programming, and messages
should stream between the two without
unrecoverable loss or large delay. Mp3 Radio
passed in most of this area. The message
transport was flawless. To this day we have
never lost a packet or gotten corrupt data that
we have noticed. The Bluetooth protocols do a
good job of getting data across, and fast too.
Everything going through the pipe does so
without noticeable latency. The phone did pretty
well. No hang-ups or crashes have happened,
although if the connection attempts fail, the
phone will block out Bluetooth for a time while it
fixes itself internally. If this happens, Bluetooth
can be turned off on the phone and then
switched back on to clear things up faster.
However, while the program is running,
everything goes very smoothly. Lastly is the
personal server. Nothing about our
programming has been causing problems, but
the server itself is a bit stubborn. Random
resets or power failures, and Bluetooth
connectivity issues have constantly been a
bother.
The second category we aimed for was usability.
Does the player work well for what it was
designed? Like the scenario in the introduction
above, can you just throw the server in a
briefcase and tune any radio around you to the
right frequency to hear your music? The answer
is yes. Our player passed with flying colors.
Getting music to and from your player requires
some more wired interfacing right now, but all
music playback is completely mobile and
wireless. Mp3 Radio passes the usability test.
The last category was music quality. How good
is the sound that comes from the player? The
answer is about what you would expect from an
FM broadcast. The signal is good and clear if
your server is near the radio, but once you go
about 20 feet away, the signal begins to die
down. That is the nature of radio broadcast, but
for what it would be used for, the 20 radius is
acceptable. On a related note, plugging
headphones into the server works perfectly,
although not within our project goals.
7. Conclusion and Future Work
The next thing this project needs is features.
Our Mp3 Radio project only implements the
minimal functions of a music player such as play,
stop, next, and previous. Other players have
things like fast forward, reverse, much more
playlist control, or current song information.
Much of this is supported in some way or
another by Madplay; it would just be a matter of
extending the project. Unfortunately, we didn’t
have the time to do that.
Seeing the song play time displayed on the
phone, along with the bit rate and other common
Mp3 header information, would be a definite
plus, and should be one of the first things to
improve on the phone’s interface. Real time
song information would mean sending constant
updates to the phone, which may or may not
affect the efficiency of the player. However, it is
likely that the extra messages will not be too
much of a burden, and some packet loss would
definitely be acceptable since the data could
easily be interpolated.
As far as extending playlist control, it would be
nice to have full control over playlists. Using the
phone, a user should be able to create new lists,
load saved ones, and modify them on the fly.
Currently,
[what CAN we do?]
Another feature of our project that could be done
in the future is a file transfer system. Currently,
there is no way to add or remove music from the
compact flash except by removing the memory
card and reading it on some other device. We
need some sort of front end for the users to
access the files with.
There are two routes to take on this, either a
network approach or a web approach. A front
end could be built that would create an SSH
session to the personal server via its wireless
connection, or even use FTP protocols to
transfer files in and out. This approach would be
efficient and secure, but it is downfall is
portability. The goal of Mp3 Radio is portability.
Taking your music anywhere means a user
shouldn’t be confined to a single computer with
installed software to transfer files.
A better approach is a web solution. The
personal server runs an Apache web server, so
why not take advantage of that? A web
application could be created that would let you
upload and manage files from any internet
connection.
Another thing to consider would be a peer to
peer connection. Perhaps users could
exchange files directly from personal server to
personal server. This introduces more security
issues and would be a whole other project, but
would be an interesting thing to tackle.
Something we could have done better if we did
the project over again, would be to learn
Symbian. A guide to programming in Symbian
would have been a great thing to have, but we
learned it all the hard way, and spent many
frustrating hours not getting anywhere. Similarly,
another valuable lesson can be learned here.
Start early.
8. Acknowledgements
A warm thanks to Trevor Pering from Intel
Research, who has been invaluable in helping
with everything concerning the personal server.
Thank you to Don Patterson and Nik Livic for
help figuring out how to program to the Nokia
phone.
personal server the following command is
needed to run the application:
> ./madplay –r /mnt/cf1/Music/*.mp3
-r is a repeat flag. This will cause the playlist to
loop when it reaches its end instead of closing
the player.

9. References The directory is the path to the compact flash

[1] Bemused. http://bemused.sf.net
[2] Winamp. http://winamp.com
[3] Windows Media Player.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedi
a/default.aspx
10. Appendices
10.1 – Personal Server Codebase
card which contains the music in a directory
called Music.
The player is instructed to play all files in that
directory (*.mp3) by default. However, the
player ideally will start up and automatically wait
for a playlist to come from the phone before
playing any songs.

The code base for Mp3 radio came from the

Madplay source. We took the Madplay player
and added the necessary code to it to support
Bluetooth connections and handle any new
messages and functions we needed. The three
files modified from the Madplay directory are the
following:

 madplay.c – The Madplay entry point.

Modified to open and close Bluetooth
connections before and after running the main
player.
 player.c – The bulk of music playback.
Modified to support Bluetooth input instead of
keyboard input to control playback as well as
where all of our new functions to handle
playlists on the fly and any other things we
needed Madplay to do.
 player.h – Extended the player struct to
include some Bluetooth and current directory
information.

The code can be compiled simply by running

“make”. However, strange things have
happened when “make clean” is not run before
recompiling the player. It is recommended to run
“make clean” before each build.

10.2 – Running the Mp3 Radio Server

Making the program will produce the executable

“madplay”. Once this file is moved to the