In reply to:

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The EMPEG can control two IDE devices. If one of those happened to be a CD-ROM drive, you'd be in business. You'd have this awful IDE cable snaking out of the EMPEG box, plus you'd have to write device drivers and so forth.

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A great idea, but still most laptop or slimline cdroms do require extra power, the extra not supplied by the ide chain that the hard disks run off (extra 5 volts). I suppose if you were willing to do some soldering, and create the extra power unit on the outside of the empeg, it would be feasable to mount a slimline cdrom on the outside of the empeg, you would have to completely re-engineer your docking sled, but it is do-able. I dont really want to try this, but I would probably prefer to get a really big ide drive to replace my two current ones, and somehow pickup a slimline laptop cdrom, anyone have a laptop I can bastardise?

But to use this setup, one would have to muck with the kernel to auto mount cdroms on insert, and auto-umount them on eject button press. Not to mention the player would somehow have to be able to look to the cdrom, and play wav's (New in 1.1, eta unknown). I suppoes the kernel could mount the cdrom as drive2, and generate fids for the tracks on the cdrom, but then again, I dont know much about the player software, perhaps someone else could comment on the kernel and player requirements to play audio tracks off a cdrom.