I'm looking into starting a little project and making a music player from a microcontroller. I guess I need a SD card as storage for the music files and some high frequency PWM output, but that's almost all I know about this.
Has anyone done something like this or has any idea where to start and what to do? The idea is not 8-bit sound, but full .mp3 (or .wav) audio files.

 

Have you done any research on your task?

 

You should consider a sigma delta DAC, a standard hard drive with a SATA or SATA II interface, and an FPGA or you could just buy one for a couple hundred bucks and skip the development time and cost.

 

Once in a while we do get these curious questions about a microcontroller playing some recorded sounds/music through SD-card.

Here's one example I've made up using a PWM module in a PIC32 microcontroller on a breadboard. It's only playing *.wav files at 8khz-44khz sampling rates:
http://forum.cytron.com.my/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=11583

Sometimes, you can use modules to directly play the Mp3 files, and you just send commands to the module to play a certain file or something. You have to search these in eBay.

 

There are new PIC with hardware DA its 8 bit only.

MCU isnt much used to play mp3 as you need a lot of computation power for this, instead hardware mp3 chip is used.