Using my LG Dare as a Music Server

I like to listen to music while I am in my workshop. You would think this would be easy, and it would be if I were not so lazy. I want to be able to walk into the shop, throw a switch, and just have the music start – without thinking about a thing.

You might think that a radio would be just the thing, but there is only one passable FM radio station in my area and while I like a lot of their music, I don’t love it.

What about an old computer? Well, I don’t want to keep it on all the time or wait for it to boot up or log on or anything like that.

And how about Satellite Radio? Well, I am too cheap to pay for it.

But the LG Dare, plugged into a small charger, running all the time, might be just right. I plan to put the speakers onto the switch that I turn on when I enter the shop, so they will draw power only when I am using them.

Loading the Music

One can certainly use V-Cast/Rhapsody to load music. In fact, I had to install the V-Cast software on one of my computers in order to figure out the file structure of the Dare. But my goal is to pop micro-SD cards into and out of the Dare as my music store. I figure that it will be easier than using special software.

So, I loaded V-Cast onto the Vista side of the Timeline-X computer and told it to connect to the Dare. I then dragged some music  files from a windows explorer folder into the music directory on the Dare. I added a playlist and put a few songs into that as well.  The display on V-Cast shows that I had three folders: music, albums and playlists. I told the system to disconnect from the Dare, powered down the Dare, and removed the micro-SD card.

When I plugged the micro-SD card into my main computer, it had five folders on it:

• media
• my_flix
• my_music
• my_pix
• my_sounds

The music was in the my_music folder (with all file names in lower case). I could not find the playlist; I searched for it several times. My only guess is that this could be on the part of the Dare that is not removable. It seems that all the music goes into this folder without subdirectories.