Building A Museum Listening Station? 251
Anonymous Coward writes "I am building a museum exhibit which requires the use of 10 listening stations. These should be able to play back a few minutes of audio, should have an obvious Play button (and no other buttons: less confusion for the elderly and less to break for the kids), and should be able to work with an absolute minimum of supervision for three months of constant use. There are fancy ready-made solutions to this problem, but at $350, it would be too expensive to buy 10 of them. Similarly, there are cheap solutions ($20 CD player + $15 headphones), but this is probably not reliable or user friendly enough for this exhibit. Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions for how to build a reasonably inexpensive museum listening station?"
Go MP3? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not one that does 10 stations or more? (Score:5, Insightful)
Directed sound (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Radio-based solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mp3 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Lazy you - Uh... Screw you. (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh right, you have ALL the answers...
How does a comment like this get modded as 'Insightful'? C'mon people - USE YOUR HEADS!
Re:Mp3 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Mp3 (Score:5, Insightful)
The only shortcoming of this simple plan is that the audio is always playing.
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Re:Lazy you (Score:5, Insightful)
As an aside, why do people so often get pissed about the ask slashdot sections? Google does an excellent job for most things, but if you're considering building some project or doing something technically interesting google doesn't always have links to all the pitfalls or the interesting storys that go along with a project from someone with experience in that area. These often end up being the most interesting threads, IMHO.
Been there, done that (Score:5, Insightful)
I use to work for Virgin Entertainment Group, Inc. (the Virgin Megastores in the US) and other retailers where listening stations were involved.
Really you have to consider how many people will comoe through the exhibit, average age, how long the exhibit will run etc. to understand what solution is best or to really cost it out.
So if you go with $15 dollar headphones, will they stand up to being put on, taken off, people tugging on them, etc. or will you be replacing one set a day due to breakage? This naturally means each set doesn't cost $15, but each station costs somewhat higher than that. You really need to think along these lines to compare costs. Especially given your condition of minimal oversight; that means people will be more inclined to abuse them (or rather less inhibited to, and yes even the queit museum crowd will abuse equipment as we saw in our classical departments.)
You could source the sound from a single computer, but you would need multiple output channels (probably multiple sound cards) and software to support it. Other than the pre-packaged solutions, I'm not so familiar with what's available in this category.
If you want to go cheaper could you not use actual speakers, with partitions and volume settings such that there isn't too much bleed over from one sound space to another? Disney actually puts this same kind of concept to effective use on many of their themepark rides. This would eliminate the 'touch' element which usually cause headphones to die in these situations. Of course, not seeing the exhibit, it might not be practical.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why not one that does 10 stations or more? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think a PC with some software might work great but unless someone is going to code the software for him i doubt it will work.
Re:CD player works great (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No, it can't be done on the cheap. (Score:3, Insightful)
Before moving to NC, I spent 7 1/2 years with a large fire/rescue department in Florida. The radios we had - Motorola's - were worse then the old analog systems we used when I first started. As in you couldn't key up, the radios would not receive inside patient's houses, etc. For a 15 million dollar or so system, I think I would rather take a CB and some repeaters then the junk Motorola sold us.
Re:Been there, done that (Score:1, Insightful)
How long since you've been there? (Score:3, Insightful)
they are solid state mp3 player type devices...
you enter a track# and it plays it from internal memory... and they are not cheap devices at all...
Re:No, it can't be done on the cheap. (Score:2, Insightful)
The phone analogy is good, but backwards. This situation seems more akin to installing a new payphone in your living room, rather than using a cheap phone from Wal-Mart. The museum in question cannot afford to waste an extra few thousand dollars on features, reliability, and personnel that it doesn't need. They are asking Slashdotters for free help over the Internet, after all.
Re:Radio-based solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mp3 (Score:3, Insightful)
hmpf. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's rather rude. There are plenty of older people perfectly confortable with compuers, and at least as many young luddites.
Some Problems with the Problem Statement (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Why not one that does 10 stations or more? (Score:2, Insightful)
It, (like Kontakt) can stream audio files directly from the hard drive, eliminating the need for a lot of RAM. You would need an audio card with 10 outputs, however, like the parent poster said. You could get multiple cards if you need to have more outputs. Maybe USB or firewire external ones would be a good idea.
As for rigging play buttons, look into MAME cabinet building sites. They describe how to wire seperate buttons into a keyboard encoder, which is outputed as a keyboard or USB signal.
This is probably the simplest and most reliable way to do this. It should be better than having 10 different playback devices. It shouldn't be too expensive, either.