SparkFun MP3 Player Shield- MP3 decoder- Turn Any Compatible with Arduino Board into a Fully Functional MP3 Player- 3.5mm Audio Out Jack- 0.1" Spaced Header for Speaker Out- microSD Card Slot

Sample code does not work very well. Set up music files per the sample but performance was spotty at best.

I've been trying to get this board to work reliably for a week now, and at this point, I'm giving up. Its ability to resync with MP3 data seems to be very poor, and results in locking up with the interrupt line high, which means the Arduino wedges at that point. I've seen it with two different Arduino boards. So I thought maybe I could use WAV files. Nope. Even with the data being played back off of the onboard flash (PROGMEM), I get distorted audio played slowly and at a lower pitch, with massive distortion, indicating a buffer overrun. And although the Arduino Uno R4 can use faster SPI bus speeds, it doesn't respond above about 20 MHz, and it isn't usable at 20 MHz. Some of this may be the libraries I'm using (I'm working with Adafruit's library, because I don't do GPL v3), but the ease with which I could make this thing lock up is downright horrifying. The best part was that I actually managed to make it lock up just feeding WAV data. In that mode, I was literally doing nothing more than starting and stopping the flow of bytes of uncompressed data. So either I got a dud board or this chipset is simply the worst, buggiest piece of hardware I've ever had the displeasure of working which. I don't know which, but I've read enough comments from others having trouble with this chipset to suspect that it is the latter. I'm giving up. It really should not be this hard to trigger playback of audio clips without half a second of latency, or make them jump back to the beginning while they're still playing, or any of the other things that just don't work well with this chip.

I had a really difficult time getting this board to work. I was able to solder the headers I needed just fine but the software available on the Sparkfun website is not user friendly, and there is little documentation on how to get started with the device compared to other products they sell.

Was sent only in thin plastic bag that was in an envelope. Som pins war bend. I was wery surpriced over bad backing on computer parts.