In preperation for the tybee-500 my brother and I have been triing to figure how to carry over 10 hours of music on the boat without needing to change a cd or battery. Our other big problem is that we need a way to keep the system dry, and power and amplifier so that the music will be loud enouh to hear! So far this is what we have figured out....
The player we have bought is a 10Gb MP3 player... this is about 3x the memory of the songs I have, and is enough to hold over 10000 min of music, or about 4000 songs. It is powered by a lith-ion battery with a play-back battery life of 16 hours. The unit is slightly smaller than a small disc-man and weighs less than a pound.
I next canabalized an amplifier out of a pair small sony portable speakers and re-wired it so that it will accept 8 AA batteries instead of the 4 that were originally powering it (double the battery life, should play for over 30 hours without killing the batterys). The amp and player fit into a small rubermaid container which will seal and keep the water off of the parts that need to 'stay dry!' A small hole has been drilled in the container and the speaker wires thread out and sealed with a little 5200. I then purchased a pair of 4.5 x 4.5 waterproof speakers from west marine which come with brackets to mount the speakers. the thought is that we will mount these right behind the tacktic on the spin pole and run the speaker wires back to the tramp where the 'container' will be stored in the tramp bag with other safety gear.
On initial tests it seems to be working great, and our only problem is that we need to find the volume that is appropriate for still hearing the puffs and other important sounds on the water! Also putting together play lists... we have LOTS of music, but what of it do you want to hear while sailing up the entire florida and georgia east coast!?!?!
Chris
www.acceleratedchaos.com 
Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana 
