Development board for a MP3/Media player project

[daniel5555]

Hello guys.
I’m a computer science student (not specifically electronics-related), but I have a project which consists in implementing my own firmware for Mp3/media player.

I wouldn’t need to touch the electronics part itself, so it’s not circuit-related. I would rather use some board with a bunch of components like a microcontroller, screen, etc, and program it to act like an MP3-player.

Ideally this player should be able to navigate and select files from a SD-card, play them, have all the typical controls of an MP3-player (like change sound volume, scrolling, etc) and additionally have some other functions (like displaying JPEG photos). The more functions, the better. Ideally I want it to be as close as possible to the real commercial players. So you can guess that it also should have a good interface, ideally a touch screen interface with icons.

This project seems to be pretty big and I’m not sure if it’s feasible to make it all alone (in 3-4 months or so starting from September), but I can reduce the requirements a bit later, since it’s my own project, even though I do it to get a degree from my University.

So my question is what board would you recommend for this project? I had experience programming PICs with a small touch screen, but I wouldn’t mind to go to other architecture, particularly ARM.

I myself am very interested in this Mikromedia Plus board: http://www.mikroe.com/mikromedia/plus/stm32/ , because it looks like it has everything that I may need for my project and it gives me a lot of possibilities, but I don’t know if it’s a good choice for a beginner.

I also would appreciate any advice on programming for ARM/your suggested architecture, like what manuals should I read to become familiar with it, what IDEs (preferably free) are the most appropriate for this task, etc.

Another thing I need to mention is that I’m not particularly interested in implementing a decoding algorithm. I would rather focus on implementing a way to navigate files using MP3-tags and other functions, while the decoding/playing part would do a specialized circuit.

Thank you!!