Yeah, basically, if i read directly from the SD card, either byte by byte, or block by block. It plays but stutters an awful lot. The main SPI bus runs at 8MHz, but even then something is wierd.
Its possible that it is due to both elements being on the same bus, but I doubt that as I was disabling the data input while reading from the SD card. But anyway, it works this way, it just annoyingly takes around 30 seconds to buffer a song (depending on how big the song is).
I had thought to use the filename, but the Arduino SD library only allows 8.3 filenames. The SD card is the only bit of code that I didn’t write for this as I really didn’t feel like working out how to decode the FAT filesystem.
But still, it was a fun project - alot more than I thought one of the set projects we could have chosen from would be (slightly simpler things like an alarm clock). Plus it is always nice to come up with you own ideas - even if people beat you to it 13 years ago! 