Retro-style CD player controls

I have fond memories of my old music tapes and their players. One characteristic of tape players is the way the buttons would latch down when pressed, and pop back up with an unmistakable "clack" at the end of the tape or when you pressed the stop button.

Here's a nice little idea for a retro-style CD player. Basically, the player is designed such that you load the CD in the front, vertically, through a clear plastic door. To open the door, you press a button labelled "stop/eject" when the CD is not playing. Once the door is closed, simply press "play" and the play button latches down, followed by the CD spinning up and playing. The button stays down as long as the machine is running. The player is built without a track display-only a "power on" light and (if it's battery operated) a "low battery" light, for authenticity.

If you press the "stop" button during play before the end, the play button pops up, shutting off the power. The player has built-in memory that allows it to "remember" the stopping place on up to 20 disks. The position is written to the memory automatically on power- off, and goes to that exact position when you play a disk with a stopping point saved. If the amount of memory is exceeded, it automatically deletes the oldest entry on the list. This way, you can have it remember your stopping point in a "book on CD", for example.

If you want to change the starting position, you must insert the disk and "shuttle" it back to the beginning or back/forward to the place you want to start. the FF/REW buttons click down, just like the play button, and release upon pressing a different button or upon reaching the end of the disk. The FF/REW buttons trigger the laser to "seek" across the tracks at faster than normal speed, but keeping the disk turning at normal speed. (you can generally hear the laser moving back to the beginning in a normal CD player when you change disks, so this sound would be somewhat comparable to that of a tape being moved at high speed) and when you press the "play" button, the laser stops moving, and starts reading the disk at normal play speed

When the CD reaches the end, the "play" button pops back up automatically and the player powers down. In order to return to the beginning on that disk, you must press the "rewind" button and wait for the laser to "rewind" itself back to the starting position. Hopefully it wouldn't take as long as it takes to actually rewind a tape, however. If you try to press "play" on a disk where the memory indicates that the last time it was played it reached the end and wasn't reset, the button would pop back up shortly after being pushed.

Don't worry, the player won't scratch your CD if it brakes :) anyone ever have a tape player which abandoned it's musical career to pursue becoming a chef-which speciallized in TAPE SALAD?? (tape salad being tangled up film resulting from a tape player that malfunctioned and unrolled the film inside the machine)

Too bad they never made double sided CD's though-those would be perfect for this player :D Then again, you'd need 2 lasers if you wanted to make an "auto-reverse" player!