If you're writing your own code, ensure you don't have the amplifier disabled using the
shutdown signal (EN_GPIO1, which is on A2). This signal should be HIGH to activate the
amplifier.
Note that this amplifier chip has a feature that slowly ramps up the volume when it's first
turned on.
Power problems:
Do you have a power source connected, and is the power switch turned on? (The red power
LED should be on).
If playback starts but stops in the middle, ensure you're using a fully-charged battery.
Remember that the 5V FTDI will power the board enough to program it, but not enough to
drive the speakers. You must use a Lipo battery or other external power source.
The battery charge chip (located between the 3.3V pin and the right s pin) will get
warm while charging a battery, especially if the battery is empty. This is normal. It will cool
down as the battery is filled.
Pause before playing?
A customer called us with a strange problem: their LilyPad MP3 Player was playing audio
files, but only after a long pause. The same files played normally on a PC. After looking at
their files, we realized that the files contained an image of the album cover as part of the
metadata. Since this data is at the beginning of the file, the VS1053 chip had to read through
(and ignore) all the image data before getting to the actual audio data. Loading the audio files
into Audacity and saving them back out without the metadata fixed the problem.
Still having problems?
If you still can't get it working, please contact our
, who will be happy
to help you out.
Supported Audio Formats
The VS1053B audio decoding chip built into the LilyPad MP3 Player understands a wide variety of
audio file formats. Occasionally you'll run into something it can't play; in that case you can often load
it into the audio-editing software of your choice and "save as" a different format.
Below is a summary of the audio formats that the VS1053B understands, along with the common
filename extensions for those formats. Note that the "player" sketch checks each file to ensure that
it has one of these extensions: MP3, WAV, // MID (MIDI), MP4, WMA, AAC, FLA, OGG, but this is
solely to avoid sending non-audio data to the VS1053B from other files that may be on your micro-
SD card. The chip itself doesn't care about the extension. If you're using the player sketch, you can
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