Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the what-the-hell dept.
gopher writes
" IMBDEV
has just started shipping a customizable MP3 decoder board that
can use either your computers serial or parallel port. It also
comes with complete source code and prototyping space so that
it can be customized." I'm not quite sure what to make
of this.
98 comments
Hmmmmm.....
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
More toys never killed a geek....:)
Ummm, not on my system
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
sounds cool if you have a 8086 or something that can't handle a 160kbps encoded MP3. But I think most of the system out there in cyber-lala-land that have a sound card in them can handle it. The only place where I think this might come in handy, is elimnating any "noise" the sound card puts out in the sound stream due to other cards in the system..
The point?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
hrmm...Maybe I'm stupid but what's the point of the decoder? To use like a mpman or to decode mp3's on your computer instead of using CPU power? (which, would rule for those times when your stuck with a computer that doesn't have enough CPU power to decode MP3's.)
what could this be used for?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Not to clear on what this is good for (not techie enough, I guess).. but could it be used to develop DJing equipment? That would be cool.
Encoder?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Looks like they have (more expensive) encoder boards - now that's what I want some hardware for!
mp3 Encoders
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
If you want some really good sounding mp3's check out AudioActive. We've got one of their encoders here at work, and it sounds (to me at least) as good as the CD it came off of. 'course it's probably real expensive and requires some serious Audiophile equipment...
Now, If I can only rework their stuff so that it can stream into the Realplayer and use our plugins. Damn undocumented legacy code.
BitPoet www.bitcasting.com
Parallel port? Feh.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Anyone have one of these? http://www.interlog.com/~miclee/mp3.html
One good use
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
the point is not to free your sound card...but your proccessor
you cant play a game of quake and play an MP3 beacause it will lagg the hell out of quake. (Unless you have a PII or something...even then....still useing precious CPU toime)
I think everyone has the wrong idea about it... It is an awsome Idea, people just need to understand that it is not just a second sound card for mp3's it is actualy a second pentium chip(sorta:), used stricktly to decode MP3's)
it also has an audio DAC and equalizer in the hardware supirior to most sound cards...
Parallel port? Feh.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Not quite as cool, but still a command line:) --ac
One good use
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
"... bah, my Atari Falcon can mix 32 channels in real time, at 50 kHz. Eat my dust!..."
The good old days:)
--ac
Parallel?! Use SCSI you yutzs!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
The uses to which parallel ports are being put to are absolutely abominable. Zip drives? Video capture devices? Scanners? And all claim to support a "tansparent pass-through mode". Yeah right. Just try it with more than 2 parallel devices. Or worse, try to scan and print or read the zip disk while printing. Pathetic. The parallel port has become the poor man's SCSI port. It's bad enough that some manufacturers (CDR/CDRW drives by HP... *thwack*) quit supporting SCSI altogether, offering IDE or parallel only. Oh yes, IDE, there's a winner. Got 5 devices you want to use adn you're screwed. Yes, SCSI is slightly more expensive but that's only because PC motherboard makers aren't puting SCSI on all new mother boards. SCSI just works sooo much better too. Feh. I'm screaming into the wind. Parallel will not go away, now there's USB. They'll probably try to hang disks off of that too. Did we learn nothing from the Commodore serial bus (which differs so little from USB that it's scary)?
What about bandwidth on the Serial Port
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Interestingly slow 486s you have. Even my old 286 could transfer/receive 112kbps on it's serial ports (required a decent serial card though:)
One good use
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Actually, on my PPro200, linux glqwcl + decoding mp3s ran fine, except when the mp3s switched and the player filled the audio buffer at maximum warp.
The real fun way to do it is with dual CPUs-- one for Quake, one for mp3s.
OK read this for answers :)
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Better yet, you can take a look at http://www.blackbox.org and hook one of these up to a really small 5x86/133, then use a laptop HD or the ethernet port to grab mp3s and feed them to the board. If you could find an embedded 386 w/ 2 MB of ram and an ethernet port, you could use that, too. It could probably read buttons, drive a display, and play mp3s all without breaking a sweat.
Driver does not suck, it's the parallel that sucks
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Of course the parallel driver eats cpu cycles like there's no tomorrow, but that's the only way to deal with a parallel port. You have to sit there holding it's hand while shovelling data to and from it. What did you expect? Bus-mastering parallel ports?
best way to avoid RIAA lawsuit?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
I thought about this idea for a while, the music industry can SUE anyone who is selling a device (Especially if Diamond lose the suit) but they cannot sue someone who is merely selling a chip!
Upgrade your old compact disc player!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
There's a bit more to getting a CDROM on that UcLinux SIMM then you seem to think. It's doable, but you would have to bit-bang the interface in software since there is no true bus available. So write a IDE bus emulator for it, then the normal CDROM drivers should work to provide access.
A cool idea, but it's a project for a hardware hacker with some $$$ to spend.
Sort of an aside (read: killing RIAA)
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Heya. This is Jonathan from the former crack.com. Golgotha didn't actually decode MP3 music in the background, but rather converted the songs to raw data before the level started and then streamed that while you played.
We talked to several sound card makers about getting hardware support for MP3, but most claimed the silicon for that was just too expensive. However, there are a few in the pipe or already out that will have accelerated DCT support. I haven't kept up with that and everything was under NDA so I don't know what the state is now.
But it is becoming an increasingly mute point. With a processors at 500MZ, the cycles needed to do decoding approach 1-3%. Not something to worry about. It's a good marketing gimick, but your money is better spent on a faster CPU, bus or 3d card.
PS. I just posted the MP3 music from golgotha at http://jitit.com/golgotha if you looking for some good non-vocal music to listen to.
Parallel port? Feh.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Christ, enough chips on that board. Don't see the point, myself.
What about bandwidth on the Serial Port
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
There are various hacks (using the handshaking ports for data transfer, etc.) that can improve the throughput on an LPT port dramatically over the theoretical max. Look at Laplink, Fastwire, etc. for examples.
Could this be combined with the PalmPilot project?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
What would be really cool is if this could be linked up with the palm pilot or supersimm project to do the car-based mp3 player.
Ummm, not on my system
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Yeah Right! I have an AMD5x86 and the only way I can play MP3's is if I'm not running X, and if I downsample it by a factor of 2 and only decode it mono.
Add Digital Out! Easy!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Should be fairly easy to add a digital out - Crystal semiconductor makes transmitter and receiver chipsets that take the I2S bus (3 wire serial that normally hooks up to a DAC) and spits out AES/EBU (balanced) or SPDIF (single ended) digital IO. You can even hook a fiber optic transmitter (TOSLINK) to those chips. The MPEG decoder used on the board puts out I2S - and you can get the Crystal transmitters in a DIP package - so it should be fairly easy to hack this together on the prototyping area of the MPEG board.
In fact - NSM makes an MP3 decoder card that utilizes the older brother of the MPEG decoder and DAC used on this hobby MPEG board. The NSM card has digital out using the Crystal transmitter. So there is proof it will actually work if you get it all hooked up correctly;)
128kbps is not high bandwidth
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
We definitely need more hardware articles so the programmers start to get a little education! There's nothing wrong with sending 16 kilobytes per second out the parallel port. Also, there's a PIC processor on the board that does some buffering, so timing is not important. How you say RTFM?
Why not write a PIC gcc back-end too
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Just think, you could write a gcc back-end for the new PIC18Cxx family, then porting a CD-ROM driver would be a tiny bit easier. Or buy a C compiler for the PIC.
But it would still be f***ing hard to do, which is the point. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it would probably take quite a while unless someone has come out with a CD-ROM that has a serial interface (RS232/RS485/SPI/I2C) which I doubt.
By CD-ROM do you mean computer CD-ROM or a consumer audio CD-ROM? Seems that a consumer one with an I2C interface would be easy to control but hard to get data out of, and you'd need an IDE or SCSI controller to use a computer one.
This is just an eval kit too
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Agreed that USB is nice, but putting an isochronous USB interface on the MAS3507D/DAC3550A evaluation board would be non-trivial (as opposed to a parallel port or RS-232) plus it's less hacker-friendly right now. That might change (I hope it does) but since this board appears to be for hobbyists or for demonstrating the MP3 decoder chip, the interface is not that important.
MPEG3 does not exist !
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Arrrrgh ! Yet another person talking about MPEG3 when they really mean MPEG-1 audio layer 3. And now they are device manufacturers ! This is driving me crazy ! I'm certainly not going to look further into this device. If they don't even know the name of the standard they have implemented, I wouldn't bet on the quality of their implementation...
Parallel?! Use SCSI you yutzs!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
If you think USB differs little from the commodore serial bus you're very blind (or have no idea about USB). As someone who's designed/written firmware for both SCSI and USB devices:
a) SCSI is great, but SCSI chains with lots of different devices often behave in nonsensical, unreliable ways: this puts me off having more than 3 or 4 devices on an *external* bus - a missed handshake can hang the bus so you need to do a hard reset, which isn't fun for a tapedrive which then wants to rewind... b) USB is properly thought out, but it requires a large weight of software on the host end - better than on both ends (like scsi), but a pain for linux as there's a lot of work to do to get it going. USB isn't designed for high-bandwidth devices, but there are plenty of devices which *don't* need lots of bandwidth, but USB with it's integral power feed is a dream with...
Hugo empeg (not ac, just on the wrong machine...)
"kpbs": Kilopits ber second?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
If so, I guess it's a very fast fruit (or olive) processor, described by subbody with a bad head code and a sduffed-up doze. Otoh, maybe Public Broadcasting Systems are being created at an alarming rate... === enby
Already happened
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Many Amiga soundcards already do that, since the 68k needs all the help it can get on "modern" compute-bound stuff like decoding MP3s.
Alas, I'm not sure it makes much sense in the long run. A 68060 may benefit from a coprocessor on this kind of thing, but I'm not sure a PPC or P6 does.
Not sure the Amiga needs it either, but Amigas are known for spending hundreds of dollars to lower their CPU utilization by a few percent. (See the programmed-I/O IDE vs. DMA SCSI wars of the early 90s.;-)
MPEG3 does not exist !
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Silicon rubber and silicon grease don't exist, either, but that's a matter of being taught to spell by cockamamie methods. To get back to the point, many Americans (I'm native-born) don't care much or at all for what's technically correct. If you doubt that, ask what the baud rate is for a 56kbps modem (9.6 kbaud?). "Baud" is one syllable; "bps" is three, and sounds far less impressive. Maybe old Emile would like the implicit publicity... === enby (lazy coward)
AVR is *much* better and has GCC too
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Why anyone want to use the PIC's escapes me. The ATMEL AVR have comparable features, prices, and sizes (http://www.atmel.com), but a much saner processor. There are even ports of GCC and LCC to this architecture, see http://medo.fov.uni-mb.si/mapp and http://cabella.cabella.it/usr/local/etc/htdocs/x ware/avr).
I think a CD-ROM based reader is quite doable with one of the bigger AVRs.
/Tommy (can't remember my password)
MP3 decoding load is measurable?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
By the way, if you want to play 2 sound channels at once through one sound card, get an Ensoniq AudioPCI es1371 (don't think the es1370 will do it.) The Linux driver provides two devices,/dev/dsp and/dev/dsp1, and handles mixing itself with low CPU usage.
Actually, both es1370 and es1371's have 2 dacs. I have an sb pci64 (removing the sb sticker, it's an ensoniq es1370. That's what the chip and the driver says,g.). I've played quake2 on/dev/dsp1 and an mp3 on/dev/dsp.
I have another sound card in the machine. I found out some programs (like rvplayer, xwave, etc) don't like the es137x driver. Rvplayer seems to distort a little and xwave just doesn't work (complains about 256byte buffer)
MPEG3 does exist, kind off.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 0
Well, you're right strictly speaking, but not entirely. The succesor to MPEG-2 is called MPEG-4 to get around a possible mix up. That is kind of the same as accepting MP3 to be called MPEG-3.
oppinion of an EE student.
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 2
Ok, I took a look. all the comments about your sound card being good enough.... that has nothing to do with it. an MP3 decoder board actualy DECODES the MP3. In other words where your proccesor(pentium etc..) would normaly decode it, it is instead decoded by this board. the board also looks to have a VERY VERY high quality audio DAC... which means it will sound very good. much better than most sound cards.
now here are the possible uses of this 1) you like to play with hardware (me:)) 2) you have a computer that is not powerfull enoiugh to decode an MP3 3)play MP3's while playing a game of quake... and have it not affect your lagg/performance etc.. i.e. all cpu time goes to quake, and not to decodeing the mp3. 3) car mp3 players... instead of buying an expensive pentium system and sound card all you need is a cheep 486 with a few megs of RAM and a hradisk. (and still have power left over to run GPS or something!) 4) it comes with source code...... make a portable with a laptop hard disk... if you are any good with microconrtollers it shouldent be too difficult.
You know it's a good product when they sell it using blinking yellow text.:-)
What about bandwidth on the Serial Port
by
jandrese
·
· Score: 2
This shouldn't be a problem for the Paralell port version, but IIRC PC serial ports can trasfer at 112kpbs maximum whereas several MP3s can be encoded as high as 224kpbs. Worse, many old computers (486s) can only transfer at 56kpbs, which cuts out a large portion of the MP3s available. Naturally this isn't a problem if you encode your own music, but it might be if you download from online MP3 resellers or fledgling bands.
Parallel?! Use SCSI you yutzs!
by
Trepidity
·
· Score: 1
To be fair, IDE can support more than four devices. Two devices per controller. Most motherboards come with two controllers, but you can buy more, so you can have six or eight IDE devices hooked up.
As for USB, what's wrong with it? As long as you're not trying to do anything *really* high-bandwidth like a harddrive, it seems fine to me.
too bad the linux parallel driver sucks ass...
by
Enry
·
· Score: 1
Probably because you don't use tunelp to assign an IRQ to the parallel port. Otherwise, the lp driver polls.
What about bandwidth on the Serial Port
by
Enry
·
· Score: 1
It all depends on the serial card chipset you have. If it's not a 16550 (or similar) you may have trouble getting faster than 56kb. But most 486s and so on use the '550, which has a 16 byte FIFO and could handle 128kb.
too bad the linux parallel driver sucks ass...
by
gavinhall
·
· Score: 0
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
It is so slow you'll eat up more cpu sending the data than actually decoding it on board.
MP3 -> wav -> minidisc = not good
by
tallpaul
·
· Score: 1
This is probably not a very good idea. When you encode a regular wav file to mp3, it is a lossy process, so you lose information and quality by doing so (albeit not much). When you recreate the wav (with a decoder), that wav shows the resulting loss of quality. If you use that decoded mp3 to create a minidisc, then it gets compressed again, with lossy compression. So you get two different styles of loss. That's probably not going to give you very good results.
wav -> mp3 -> wav -> minidisc lossy lossy
Upgrade your old compact disc player!
by
sjames
·
· Score: 1
Excellent thought! Perhaps also add some sort of bank switched flash memory setup. It should be do-able by latching the higher address lines of the flash. Since the CPU is just fetching data and feeding it to the decoder, it'll have plenty of time left over to keep the display updated and poll the key switches. All of the benefits of a Rio + CDR.
Upgrade your old compact disc player!
by
sjames
·
· Score: 1
It might also be interesting to hack at it starting with an old (and stripped down) laptop. Or for that matter, a nice addition to a reasonably useful laptop that doesn't have the horsepower for MP3.
Once upon a time, computer games could simultaneously use an LAPC1 and a SoundBlaster, to get maximum quality and maximum noise out of your computer. These days, games can't do that, the LAPC1 is virtually unfindable, and the quality of music & effects has plummeted. If this system can give you the same quality music as the old LAPC1 did, games could have decent music & special effects again.
-- It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Hmm. Don't know if you're running linux, but if you are you should put your mp3 player in realtime mode (quite easy). I believe for example mpg123 can do this for you automaticly (using the right compile options). It uses about 50% of the processing power, so you have (like me) a P30 left.
Well, some people like listening to their music while doing other tasks, and the strain of decoding is formiddable yet on a large number of machines. I could thus see some market, provided it wasn't prohibitively expensve. Try running some Maple code while playing an MP3 on a plain Pentium; one quickly learns to just give up and go back to CDs...
-- chris
-----
--
--------------------------------
c. m. prince
what could this be used for?
by
Hilbert
·
· Score: 1
Good idea; you could throw a pair of them (or more?) into that MP3 mixer/scratcher that runs on BeOS (see previous slashdot article) and leave the processor free to do effects(?) I am not a sound guru, so maybe that's not technically feasable, but it would certainly make a powerful piece of equipment.
It'd be more interesting if the I/O interface was changed. USB interface circuitry is relatively cheap and is all microcontroller based. Cypress sells a development board for about a hundred bucks. Chop off that parallel port and the serial port and interface with USB. Go to your favourite store and get either an USB CD or a USB hard drive (I think these are pricey, they're made for the super mobile crowd who want a hard drive that fits in a shirt pocket)
You've now got a portable MP3 player. This may be impeded if the people who make USB devices won't tell you how to talk with their CD or hard drive (or is it like SCSI and a standard?)
I am a hardware guy and happy it was posted. There are many possibilities with a programmable device that hangs off the computer.
I have always been interested in DSPs as they can do some serious number crunching. The evaluation board they have has space set aside for prototyping and even more fun.
This would be fun for the box that has no sound card. Perfect for the workplace.:)
Not a flame, it's just that I don't think that you realize the enormity of the project.
Bad ideas for senior projects...
I remember when we were picking senior projects, we had to use a Z80 8-bit CPU to drive outputs based input in a useful manner. Well, one classmate wanted to use a VGA controller as output. Whoa. We had wired up a simple memory mapped CGA chip for earlier projects, but he was picking a design goal he had no experience with. I doubt he knew VGA was more than just simple memory mapping to draw stuff. This was to be done in one semester. From what I hear, he was still making excuses after a year trying to get it done. Quite sad.
Then there was the guy who committed to a floppy disk copier. He got smart and scaled down his project to something that would "test" the floppies by clicking down the tracks and checking for activity on the data. He passed.
Rule of projects: Keep It Short and Simple.
My project was a bit easier building a digital sampling oscilloscope, because I was able to cut and paste previous code from working earlier projects.
shoving 3+ meg files through your parallel port?
by
timw
·
· Score: 1
Nowadays you can DMA to your parallel port, so that it doesn't touch the CPU at all. It depends what protocol the device uses though -- you can't DMA things other than ECP and normal 'compatibility mode', in general.
The reason that the Zip driver is slow is that the Zip drive doesn't use interrupts. There isn't really a lot of getting around that.
Driver does not suck, it's the parallel that sucks
by
timw
·
· Score: 1
This is just what I've been looking for. If and when drivers are ported to Linux, I'll snag one for sure. I've got an old Compaq 486 laptop running Suse 5.3 like a champ, but there's no built-in sound options. Sounds like this card/adapter would let me play mp3's from the laptop.
I hear people complaining about the low bandwidth of the pport, but I think they must surely get around that by buffering, so it's a non-issue, me thinks.
If I hear a favorable response from someone who gets one, I'll grab one too!
We don't have soundcards at work, but this would make that irrelevant! I could also cranks mp3's at parties w/out having to lug a big system around.
When using this to listen to MP3's, your soundcard is free. I still haven't figured out how to make more than one piece of software use my card at the same time
With this I can actually play a game with it's effects _and_ listen to MP3's at the same time. Neat...;)
-- "Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
Print server -> MP3 decoder?
by
Incendiary
·
· Score: 1
I have a NETQue ethernet to serial & parallel print server. I wonder if I could use lpd to stream an MP3 over ethernet to my print server and out to the MP3 decoder. Any thoughts?
shoving 3+ meg files through your parallel port?
by
TheBrain_
·
· Score: 1
i'm not quite sure, but when you stream somthing out of your parallel port, dosent it EAT your cpu? all i know is when ever i use my parallel zip drive to transfer a 10+ meg file, i might as well get something to drink, drink it, go for a smoke, then come back to use the computer again. i can just imagine those mp3's made from cd's without any tracks, where the mp3 is 50+mb.
Well, those of us who run BeOS have that functionality allready.. Be mixes sounds on the fly, and provides you a mixer for each input. Last night i checked, and i had 14 channels of sound being mixed together. Each sound for BeAIM has its own channel, and so I can set them to have their own relitive volume. I had the sound from Snes9x, a CD, BeAIM, and, just for the hell of it, an MP3 all playing at the same time, and if the system had wanted to let me know, it could have beeped at me. At times, ive had 3 mp3's all decoding at the same time, playing at diferent speeds. It sounds funky, but its a good demo of what the BeOS can do. Oh, i have a K6-2/400 if you were wondering. --Dave
-- Any sufficiently advanced magic is
indistinguishable from technology
MP3 decoding load is measurable?
by
Espressoman
·
· Score: 1
Hmmm, I know it's just cruelty to you guys, but playing mp3s (stored across NFS) uses less than 1% of my system CPU time, and 3% of my RAM (X11amp I'm talking of here). Needless to say, I can do all kinds of cool things whilst listening to completely uninterrupted music. Like I can have five smooth Mesa screensavers running in windows, be compiling the latest Gnome CVS, writing emails, playing with the GIMP and Blender, etc.
But hey, it's no fun for me to just brag about my dual processor beastie. I also wanted to suggest a point that surely it would be cheaper to upgrade your computer than it would be to get all that mp3 specific hardware? I mean, for US $800 we build dual Celeron boards running at 450MHz (or 504MHz if you wanna match a dual PIII 500) _with_ 128MB RAM. Now that's top of the line. Surely you could get a Pentium 200 or a low end PII second hand for a couple of hundred dollars?
Hmmmm... combine this with one of those ultra miniature computers and customize your own portable player; may look a little ho-made and cost more but you can make it anyway you want and learn a bit in the process.
sounds cool if you have a 8086 or something that can't handle a 160kbps encoded MP3.
Actually, my P60 (yes, I know it's outdated but I'm a broke student) can only just keep up, provided it's doing nothing else, on a good day, in a following wind etc.
Even moving a window around on screen screws up playing MP3's:-/
This looks like a build-your-own-MP3-decoder-board kit. Neat, if you're into building hardware yourself (I was a while back). It looks like they have moderately general-purpose chips for this and boards with sample layouts that you can buy if you don't feel like designing your own.
Maybe I'm stupid but what's the point of the decoder? To use like a mpman or to decode mp3's on your computer instead of using CPU power? (which, would rule for those times when your stuck with a computer that doesn't have enough CPU power to decode MP3's.)
AFAICT, this is intended as a neat hardware project for people who like building their own hardware. See my previous message for other possible uses.
sounds cool if you have a 8086 or something that can't handle a 160kbps encoded MP3. But I think most of the system out there in cyber-lala-land that have a sound card in them can handle it. The only place where I think this might come in handy, is elimnating any "noise" the sound card puts out in the sound stream due to other cards in the system.
Actually, this would probably be more vulnerable to noise, as the board won't be very well shielded and the parallel cable *certainly* won't be.
AFAICT, this is a kit intended for people who like hardware projects, and that's about it. I suppose that you could build a portable MP3 player with the parts if you wanted to (if you also bought a microcontroller chip and maybe a flash card reader). Hardware MP3 decoding would be useful on sound cards if it isn't there already, but that would be integrated into the sound card ASIC instead of added as discrete components like this.
Some soundcards under Windows 95/98 can do this. My Monster Sound M80 could for instance.
Using E, I believe you can do something like this (using esddsp). I wish Linux had support for the M80, it's a bit old but still an amazing card:(
good base for car mp3 player
by
Kyobu
·
· Score: 1
I don't think that's true. From what I can tell, this hangs off your computer. Your computer has a fairly recent, powerful, and expensive chip in it. Therefore, you'd have to do a bit more to this board. However, if I misunderstood you, and what you really meant was that you could modify the circuit so it has a 486 or something built in, plus a power supply, etc, then maybe you could.
Could we get one of these with a digital audio out port? You know the kind I'm talking about, the optical ones found on some cd players. If such a device does exist, then I can hook it up to my MiniDisc recorder and put my mp3's on md's without the noise I get when I use a regular line cable (which is what I've been doing). Maybe it can transfer track marks too. Any info on this would be greatly appreciated.
Dysprosium
what kind of digital out?
by
dysprosium
·
· Score: 1
Hmm....I'm no audio expert here (not even close), but according to the manual, I have 3 inputs: a mic, a line in, and an "optical (digital) mini-jack." The Sony part #'s for the appropriate optical cables to hook it up to a cd player, etc. are POC-15AB, POC-15B, and a few others. Hopefully this will be of some help, but, like I said, I'm no audio expert. For all I know, you could have just asked me what OS I run, and I replied that my case is black.:)
but that would be integrated into the sound card ASIC instead of added as discrete components like this.
Most sound cards I've seen lately (actually, all of them) use a DSP. So the MP3 enc/dec would just be another DSP program.
IBM's Mwave DSP already has MPEG audio support (it does work, but it tends to make the DSP crash. A DSP crash is no fun because it discos your modem.)
-- --jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
What about bandwidth on the Parallel Port
by
elyograg
·
· Score: 1
This would only be with old ports. With the newer EPP and ECP ports, I believe the limit has been raised to about 2 megabits.
-- -
"Well?" "Deep Subject."
Sort of an aside (read: killing RIAA)
by
Gottjager
·
· Score: 2
While reading what the product was, I had a thought: What if soundcards started offering hardware MP3 com/dec as standard so that using MP3 audio would be more appealing in apps (read: games) where CPU usage is precious to begin with? I know there were a few 3D game engines that supported MP3 for background music and I know the now defunct crack.com 3D game was using MP3 for it's music. Probably wouldn't happen, but if it did catch on, it would be one more nail in the coffin for record companies.
Suggested modifications
by
Mark+Clayton
·
· Score: 1
USB hardware is cheap, but I've heard that USB drivers are a real pain to write.
but doesnt the parallel port lag the CPU too? it really would have a better use as a stand alone mp3 decoder device hooked to a simm pc..... it would make the cpu bog even more then it does... now if they could make one that hooked itself to a network......
-- --
There's only one replacement for displacement.....
If you're running Linux (dunno if it works on other unices), use Esound. It's used in gnome and is a daemon that mixes multiple audio streams before it hits the sound card. It even works with most programs that aren't esd aware with a wrapper script.
MP3 decoding load is measurable?
by
Dr.+Sp0ng
·
· Score: 1
"Hmmm, I know it's just cruelty to you guys, but playing mp3s (stored across NFS) uses less than 1% of my system CPU time, and 3% of my RAM (X11amp I'm talking of here). Needless to say, I can do all kinds of cool things whilst listening to completely uninterrupted music. Like I can have five smooth Mesa screensavers running in windows, be compiling the latest Gnome CVS, writing emails, playing with the GIMP and Blender, etc."
Nope, sorry. X11Amp does a *very* good job of hiding it's CPU usage from top. I am (err... was) writing an mp3 visualization program (some of you may remember downloading it from freshmeat, deciding it sucked, and deleting it... it was called Flashback and I've stopped working on it) that used x11amp plugins for mp3 decoding and sound output. When it was doing nothing but this, through the plugins, top would register the CPU at 99.9% free. Top doesn't provide a *true* view of the CPU usage, but it's close enough. Problem is, it's easy to hide CPU usage from it. I don't know if this was because the mp3 code was in a different thread or what, but it didn't show up in top. Using an mp3 player such as mpg123 which doesn't hide itself from top (although I'm sure x11amp doesn't do this on purpose) shows the CPU usage at closer to 8-9% on my machine. That said, I can play an mp3 and quake 2 with sound, mixing done in software, and have quake not lag one bit, on a 350mhz P2 with 64 mb of RAM. Other than for sound quality, there is absolutely no point in using one of these bitches in a newer PC. Although they have great potential for older PC's, embedded devices, wasting time:), stuff like that.
By the way, if you want to play 2 sound channels at once through one sound card, get an Ensoniq AudioPCI es1371 (don't think the es1370 will do it.) The Linux driver provides two devices,/dev/dsp and/dev/dsp1, and handles mixing itself with low CPU usage. Matt
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
MP3 decoding load is measurable?
by
Dr.+Sp0ng
·
· Score: 1
I found out some programs (like rvplayer, xwave, etc) don't like the es137x driver. Rvplayer seems to distort a little and xwave just doesn't work (complains about 256byte buffer)
This thread was a long time ago, and I'm not sure if you're gonna see this, but I read in the kernel source docs why this is... the es137x chipset doesn't support directly playing.au files like you can do with most sound cards (i.e. cat file.au >/dev/dsp), and implementing it without breaking the mmap() interface would be very difficult. Since Quake 2 uses mmap(), the authors decided to keep it the way it was because they thought it was more important. It was:-)
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
CD-> MP3-> MD = not too bad.
by
Cuchullain
·
· Score: 1
When you encode an MP3 you do so directly from a raw file ripped from a CD. Not a wav file. So You shouldn't get too horrible of a loss. Assuming that the mp3 writes its info the the MD with little to no loss and noise, it might not be as bad as you think.
-- "If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it,
it is not rightly owned if it is not shared."
-St. Augustine
My brother's hobby is audio, and I will ask him about it and search the net a little bit; my hobby is electronics, we make a good combination:)
Anyways waht kind of digital audio in does minidisc accept? S/PDIF ? Fiber? if you can tell me what it is called I will ask my bro and look around the internet and electronic catalogs I have.
The SoundBlaster Live! has a daughter card with SPDIF ports (and an internal CD-SPDIF port). I'm really satisfied with this card, but I dunno how this will work under Linux.
-= Scanline =-
-- "But I'm still like a little kid, see?
I just don't know when to quit."
- Rei
A while ago Slashdot had a feature on that Linux "box" the size of a matchbook that was a fully functional webserver - could these two things converge? Did that itsybitsy have a parallel port? Or could the decoder be altered to accept Ethernet (which I believe that boxlet had). Could just implement a direct-connect to the motherboard...
Sort of an aside (read: killing RIAA)
by
Lotek
·
· Score: 1
On a related note, I saw in a recent plan file / interview / I don't remember exactly with John Romero that all the sounds in Daikatana are going to be in MP3 format.
Of course, by the time that game eventually ships, that may not be news. (given the seemingly perpetual development time and rotating development teams...)
We need more hardware postings, the community gets a little stale talking aboput the same thing all the time, and there are non-software nerds out there, too...
Dub
-- "The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last./ post
OK, as many people have suggested, this could be combined with some sort of small form factor computer to make your own portable MP3 player, ala Rio. I personally think this would be cool to make your own boom-box form factor player that actually contains a decent size hard drive for hundreds of hours of music. Heck, I might just tackle such a project... Of course that might delay my solar powered robotic lawn mower. Oh well.:-)
Upgrade your old compact disc player!
by
rnt
·
· Score: 1
Well, actually that was just what I was going for: a cool idea.
But regarding the cdrom: wouldn't a parallel-port cdrom be a solution for the lack of IDE of SCSI connectivity?
Anyway, it's nice to think about this as a neat gizmo, but that's it as far as I'm concerned.
The uClinix simm costs about $150 if I'm not mistaken, add to that the cost of the decoder board (which I can't check because their webserver mysteriously seems to be having a hard time) and various other expenses and I guess you'd be better off buying a 2nd-hand computer... or real audio equipment.
Upgrade your old compact disc player!
by
rnt
·
· Score: 2
How about putting one of those uClinux simms in your old cdaudioplayer (after removing all the old junk from the inside...) and hook a leftover cdromdrive and the mp3 decoderboard to it?
Now your cdplayer can play music-cd's, read data-cd's (filled with MP3's for instance) and do something useful with it and you can even hook it up to an ethernet to get your music from!
Oh, and you could brag about which kernelversion *your* cdplayer is running...;-)
I already have dreams of my compact disc player sending SNMP traps when it's done playing another CDR filled with MP3's!
what could this be used for?
by
ZenBoy
·
· Score: 1
I personally think that it is a Good Thing. You can now take off the intensive cpu load of decoding Mpegs. I don't know about all of you, but running 95/MacOS/98/Whatever and whatever flavor of Amp on a less than 150Mhz system causes computers (in my experience) to be sluggish. And even on moderate range computers, it can bog down your computer by eating up cycles.
This is all great, yanno, that we can offload this kind of processing to ASICs specifically designed for the purpose. But any large, regular movement of data still eats up bus bandwidth.
100Mhz system buses are becoming more common, but the PCI bus is actually beginning to have its bandwidth eaten in huge bites (pardon the pun).
Surely a device of this kind is best connected via a channel of FireWire bandwidth? But back to my point about PCI... FireWire is implemented on certain motherboards using a PCI-to-1394 bridge chip... what do we do when the PCI bandwidth runs out?:-) It'll make your box take a performance hit of some kind.
-- Bruce M. Simpson
Unix/Network Bod & Win32 Developer
I'm looking for something like this.
by
Xenna
·
· Score: 2
I could use a serial cable running from my (noisy) server in the attic down to my living room stereo. The decoder is connected to the stereo. Now I can play MP3's on my server and hear them on the living room audio. I could control the server with a laptop in the living room or maybe some remote control solution.
Quite nice, although I would prefer an ethernet based decoder, that could have some other applications as well. Also I wonder if a 128 Kbps stream would run well over my serial ports.
Unfortunately I'm no good with hardware kits...
OK read this for answers :)
by
gopher0x
·
· Score: 3
I have talked to the company here is what it is.
think of it as a proccesor and sound card on a board that connects to your parallel port.
it DECODES the MP3 and proccess the audio.
in other words you need it if: 1)you want to play mp3 files on a 286,386,486 computer 2) you want to play mp3's on a pentium computer and still have proccessor power left to do other things. (like play quake to your favorit MP3 tune) If you tried to do this by useing you computer to decode the MP3, the game would be so lagged it would be difficult to move.. Try it (not if you have a dual 500!)
3) it comes with source code... you could turn it into a sterio component for your sterio system with that old 486 25 MHz MB and chip you have laying around....
4) put it in your car with that old 386 MB you have laying around!
5) show your freinds your 'gizzmo' and watch themn drool.
6) if you are any good at electronics you should be able to interface some type of CD-rom or HArdisk/ or other storage(flash?) to it for a completly stand alone player..No pPC required.
Instead of putting a pentium plus system in your car you can use a low end processor or even an imbedded microcontroller with this board. No power problem like you have with a standard pc motherboard.
I think its a great idea to have a decoder off-loaded from the CPU. An ENCODING option would be much better.
Currently I am using a "Dazzle Digital Video Creator" which is an parallel port video capture device. Basically it is an MPEG encoder - takes in any video source and writes out an.mpg file. Because it is a dedicated encoder chip, it is much faster and efficient than capturing uncompressed.avi files and re-encoding to mpeg - all with the CPU.
If this product ALSO did encoding I would be impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
More toys never killed a geek.... :)
sounds cool if you have a 8086 or something that can't handle a 160kbps encoded MP3. But I think most of the system out there in cyber-lala-land that have a sound card in them can handle it. The only place where I think this might come in handy, is elimnating any "noise" the sound card puts out in the sound stream due to other cards in the system..
hrmm...Maybe I'm stupid but what's the point of the decoder? To use like a mpman or to decode mp3's on your computer instead of using CPU power? (which, would rule for those times when your stuck with a computer that doesn't have enough CPU power to decode MP3's.)
Not to clear on what this is good for (not techie enough, I guess).. but could it be used to develop
DJing equipment? That would be cool.
Looks like they have (more expensive) encoder boards - now that's what I want some hardware for!
If you want some really good sounding mp3's check out AudioActive. We've got one of their encoders here at work, and it sounds (to me at least) as good as the CD it came off of. 'course it's probably real expensive and requires some serious Audiophile equipment...
Now, If I can only rework their stuff so that it can stream into the Realplayer and use our plugins. Damn undocumented legacy code.
BitPoet
www.bitcasting.com
Anyone have one of these? http://www.interlog.com/~miclee/mp3.html
the point is not to free your sound card ...but your proccessor
:), used stricktly to decode MP3's)
you cant play a game of quake and play an MP3
beacause it will lagg the hell out of quake.
(Unless you have a PII or something...even then....still useing precious CPU toime)
I think everyone has the wrong idea about it...
It is an awsome Idea, people just need to understand that it is not just a second sound card for mp3's it is actualy a second pentium chip(sorta
it also has an audio DAC and equalizer in the hardware supirior to most sound cards...
mpg123 -s song.mp3 | aplay -r -m
:)
Not quite as cool, but still a command line
--ac
"... bah, my Atari Falcon can mix 32 channels in ..."
:)
real time, at 50 kHz. Eat my dust!
The good old days
--ac
The uses to which parallel ports are being put to are absolutely abominable. Zip drives? Video capture devices? Scanners? And all claim to support a "tansparent pass-through mode". Yeah right. Just try it with more than 2 parallel devices. Or worse, try to scan and print or read the zip disk while printing. Pathetic. The parallel port has become the poor man's SCSI port. It's bad enough that some manufacturers (CDR/CDRW drives by HP... *thwack*) quit supporting SCSI altogether, offering IDE or parallel only. Oh yes, IDE, there's a winner. Got 5 devices you want to use adn you're screwed. Yes, SCSI is slightly more expensive but that's only because PC motherboard makers aren't puting SCSI on all new mother boards. SCSI just works sooo much better too. Feh. I'm screaming into the wind. Parallel will not go away, now there's USB. They'll probably try to hang disks off of that too. Did we learn nothing from the Commodore serial bus (which differs so little from USB that it's scary)?
Interestingly slow 486s you have. Even my old 286 could transfer/receive 112kbps on it's serial ports (required a decent serial card though :)
Actually, on my PPro200, linux glqwcl + decoding mp3s ran fine, except when the mp3s switched and the player filled the audio buffer at maximum warp.
The real fun way to do it is with dual CPUs-- one for Quake, one for mp3s.
Better yet, you can take a look at http://www.blackbox.org and hook one of these up to a really small 5x86/133, then use a laptop HD or the ethernet port to grab mp3s and feed them to the board. If you could find an embedded 386 w/ 2 MB of ram and an ethernet port, you could use that, too. It could probably read buttons, drive a display, and play mp3s all without breaking a sweat.
Of course the parallel driver eats cpu cycles like there's no tomorrow, but that's the only way to deal with a parallel port. You have to sit there holding it's hand while shovelling data to and from it. What did you expect? Bus-mastering parallel ports?
I thought about this idea for a while, the music industry can SUE anyone who is selling a device (Especially if Diamond lose the suit) but they cannot sue someone who is merely selling a chip!
There's a bit more to getting a CDROM on that UcLinux SIMM then you seem to think. It's doable, but you would have to bit-bang the interface in software since there is no true bus available. So write a IDE bus emulator for it, then the normal CDROM drivers should work to provide access.
A cool idea, but it's a project for a hardware hacker with some $$$ to spend.
Heya. This is Jonathan from the former crack.com. Golgotha didn't actually decode MP3 music in the background, but rather converted the songs to raw data before the level started and then streamed that while you played.
We talked to several sound card makers about getting hardware support for MP3, but most claimed the silicon for that was just too expensive. However, there are a few in the pipe or already out that will have accelerated DCT support. I haven't kept up with that and everything was under NDA so I don't know what the state is now.
But it is becoming an increasingly mute point. With a processors at 500MZ, the cycles needed to do decoding approach 1-3%. Not something to worry about. It's a good marketing gimick, but your money is better spent on a faster CPU, bus or 3d card.
PS. I just posted the MP3 music from golgotha
at http://jitit.com/golgotha if you looking for some good non-vocal music to listen to.
Christ, enough chips on that board. Don't see the point, myself.
There are various hacks (using the handshaking ports for data transfer, etc.) that can improve the throughput on an LPT port dramatically over the theoretical max. Look at Laplink, Fastwire, etc. for examples.
What would be really cool is if this could be
linked up with the palm pilot or supersimm
project to do the car-based mp3 player.
Yeah Right! I have an AMD5x86 and the only way I can play MP3's is
if I'm not running X, and if I downsample it by a factor of 2 and only decode it mono.
Should be fairly easy to add a digital out - Crystal semiconductor makes transmitter and receiver chipsets that take the I2S bus (3 wire serial that normally hooks up to a DAC) and spits out AES/EBU (balanced) or SPDIF (single ended) digital IO. You can even hook a fiber optic transmitter (TOSLINK) to those chips. The MPEG decoder used on the board puts out I2S - and you can get the Crystal transmitters in a DIP package - so it should be fairly easy to hack this together on the prototyping area of the MPEG board.
In fact - NSM makes an MP3 decoder card that utilizes the older brother of the MPEG decoder and DAC used on this hobby MPEG board. The NSM card has digital out using the Crystal transmitter. So there is proof it will actually work if you get it all hooked up correctly
We definitely need more hardware articles so the programmers start to get a little education! There's nothing wrong with sending 16 kilobytes per second out the parallel port. Also, there's a PIC processor on the board that does some buffering, so timing is not important. How you say RTFM?
Just think, you could write a gcc back-end for the new PIC18Cxx family, then porting a CD-ROM driver would be a tiny bit easier. Or buy a C compiler for the PIC.
But it would still be f***ing hard to do, which is the point. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it would probably take quite a while unless someone has come out with a CD-ROM that has a serial interface (RS232/RS485/SPI/I2C) which I doubt.
By CD-ROM do you mean computer CD-ROM or a consumer audio CD-ROM? Seems that a consumer one with an I2C interface would be easy to control but hard to get data out of, and you'd need an IDE or SCSI controller to use a computer one.
Agreed that USB is nice, but putting an isochronous USB interface on the MAS3507D/DAC3550A evaluation board would be non-trivial (as opposed to a parallel port or RS-232) plus it's less hacker-friendly right now. That might change (I hope it does) but since this board appears to be for hobbyists or for demonstrating the MP3 decoder chip, the interface is not that important.
Arrrrgh ! Yet another person talking about MPEG3 when they really mean MPEG-1 audio layer 3. And now they are device manufacturers ! This is driving me crazy ! I'm certainly not going to look further into this device. If they don't even know the name of the standard they have implemented, I wouldn't bet on the quality of their implementation...
If you think USB differs little from the commodore serial bus you're very blind (or have no idea about USB). As someone who's designed/written firmware for both SCSI and USB devices:
a) SCSI is great, but SCSI chains with lots of different devices often behave in nonsensical, unreliable ways: this puts me off having more than 3 or 4 devices on an *external* bus - a missed handshake can hang the bus so you need to do a hard reset, which isn't fun for a tapedrive which then wants to rewind...
b) USB is properly thought out, but it requires a large weight of software on the host end - better than on both ends (like scsi), but a pain for linux as there's a lot of work to do to get it going. USB isn't designed for high-bandwidth devices, but there are plenty of devices which *don't* need lots of bandwidth, but USB with it's integral power feed is a dream with...
Hugo
empeg
(not ac, just on the wrong machine...)
If so, I guess it's a very fast fruit (or olive)
processor, described by subbody with a bad
head code and a sduffed-up doze.
Otoh, maybe Public Broadcasting Systems are
being created at an alarming rate...
===
enby
Many Amiga soundcards already do that, since the 68k needs all the help
;-)
it can get on "modern" compute-bound stuff like decoding MP3s.
Alas, I'm not sure it makes much sense in the long run. A 68060 may
benefit from a coprocessor on this kind of thing, but I'm not sure a
PPC or P6 does.
Not sure the Amiga needs it either, but Amigas are known for spending
hundreds of dollars to lower their CPU utilization by a few percent.
(See the programmed-I/O IDE vs. DMA SCSI wars of the early 90s.
Silicon rubber and silicon grease don't exist, either, but that's a matter of being taught to spell by cockamamie methods.
To get back to the point, many Americans (I'm native-born) don't care much or at all for what's technically correct. If you doubt that, ask what the baud rate is for a 56kbps modem (9.6 kbaud?). "Baud" is one syllable; "bps" is three, and sounds far less impressive. Maybe old Emile would like the implicit publicity...
===
enby (lazy coward)
Why anyone want to use the PIC's escapes me.x ware/avr).
The ATMEL AVR have comparable features, prices,
and sizes (http://www.atmel.com), but a much
saner processor. There are even ports of
GCC and LCC to this architecture, see
http://medo.fov.uni-mb.si/mapp and
http://cabella.cabella.it/usr/local/etc/htdocs/
I think a CD-ROM based reader is quite doable with
one of the bigger AVRs.
/Tommy (can't remember my password)
Actually, both es1370 and es1371's have 2 dacs. I have an sb pci64 (removing the sb sticker, it's an ensoniq es1370. That's what the chip and the driver says ,g.). I've played quake2 on /dev/dsp1 and an mp3 on /dev/dsp.
I have another sound card in the machine. I found out some programs (like rvplayer, xwave, etc) don't like the es137x driver. Rvplayer seems to distort a little and xwave just doesn't work (complains about 256byte buffer)
Well, you're right strictly speaking, but not entirely. The succesor to MPEG-2 is called MPEG-4 to get around a possible mix up. That is kind of the same as accepting MP3 to be called MPEG-3.
Ok,
:))
..... :)
I took a look.
all the comments about your sound card being good enough.... that has nothing to do with it. an MP3 decoder board actualy DECODES the MP3. In other words where your proccesor(pentium etc..) would normaly decode it, it is instead decoded by this
board. the board also looks to have a VERY VERY
high quality audio DAC... which means it will sound very good. much better than most sound cards.
now here are the possible uses of this
1) you like to play with hardware (me
2) you have a computer that is not powerfull enoiugh to decode an MP3
3)play MP3's while playing a game of quake...
and have it not affect your lagg/performance etc..
i.e. all cpu time goes to quake, and not to decodeing the mp3.
3) car mp3 players... instead of buying an expensive pentium system and sound card
all you need is a cheep 486 with a few megs of RAM and a hradisk. (and still have power left over to run GPS or something!)
4) it comes with source code...... make a portable with a laptop hard disk... if you are any good with microconrtollers it shouldent be too difficult.
5)show off to your friends?
ok my bottom line
I am buying 2
hehe
You know it's a good product when they sell it using blinking yellow text. :-)
This shouldn't be a problem for the Paralell port version, but IIRC PC serial ports can trasfer at 112kpbs maximum whereas several MP3s can be encoded as high as 224kpbs. Worse, many old computers (486s) can only transfer at 56kpbs, which cuts out a large portion of the MP3s available. Naturally this isn't a problem if you encode your own music, but it might be if you download from online MP3 resellers or fledgling bands.
I read the internet for the articles.
Try that with the upcoming Quake III Arena. Don't think you'll be able to play mp3s and Quake at the same time on that PPro200.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
To be fair, IDE can support more than four devices. Two devices per controller. Most motherboards come with two controllers, but you can buy more, so you can have six or eight IDE devices hooked up.
As for USB, what's wrong with it? As long as you're not trying to do anything *really* high-bandwidth like a harddrive, it seems fine to me.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Probably because you don't use tunelp to assign an IRQ to the parallel port. Otherwise, the lp driver polls.
It all depends on the serial card chipset you have. If it's not a 16550 (or similar) you may have trouble getting faster than 56kb. But most 486s and so on use the '550, which has a 16 byte FIFO and could handle 128kb.
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
It is so slow you'll eat up more cpu sending the data than actually decoding it on board.
This is probably not a very good idea. When you encode a regular wav file to mp3, it is a lossy process, so you lose information and quality by doing so (albeit not much). When you recreate the wav (with a decoder), that wav shows the resulting loss of quality. If you use that decoded mp3 to create a minidisc, then it gets compressed again, with lossy compression. So you get two different styles of loss. That's probably not going to give you very good results.
wav -> mp3 -> wav -> minidisc
lossy lossy
Excellent thought! Perhaps also add some sort of bank switched flash memory setup. It should be do-able by latching the higher address lines of the flash. Since the CPU is just fetching data and feeding it to the decoder, it'll have plenty of time left over to keep the display updated and poll the key switches. All of the benefits of a Rio + CDR.
It might also be interesting to hack at it starting with an old (and stripped down) laptop. Or for that matter, a nice addition to a reasonably useful laptop that doesn't have the horsepower for MP3.
Either way, it's a cool idea.
Once upon a time, computer games could simultaneously use an LAPC1 and a SoundBlaster, to get maximum quality and maximum noise out of your computer. These days, games can't do that, the LAPC1 is virtually unfindable, and the quality of music & effects has plummeted. If this system can give you the same quality music as the old LAPC1 did, games could have decent music & special effects again.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Hmm. Don't know if you're running linux, but if you are you should put your mp3 player in realtime mode (quite easy). I believe for example mpg123 can do this for you automaticly (using the right compile options). It uses about 50% of the processing power, so you have (like me) a P30 left.
Well, some people like listening to their music while doing other tasks, and the strain of decoding is formiddable yet on a large number of machines. I could thus see some market, provided it wasn't prohibitively expensve. Try running some Maple code while playing an MP3 on a plain Pentium; one quickly learns to just give up and go back to CDs...
-- chris
-----
--------------------------------
c. m. prince
Good idea; you could throw a pair of them (or more?) into that MP3 mixer/scratcher that runs on BeOS (see previous slashdot article) and leave the processor free to do effects(?) I am not a sound guru, so maybe that's not technically feasable, but it would certainly make a powerful piece of equipment.
-- chris
-----
--------------------------------
c. m. prince
It'd be more interesting if the I/O interface was changed. USB interface circuitry is relatively cheap and is all microcontroller based. Cypress sells a development board for about a hundred bucks. Chop off that parallel port and the serial port and interface with USB. Go to your favourite store and get either an USB CD or a USB hard drive (I think these are pricey, they're made for the super mobile crowd who want a hard drive that fits in a shirt pocket)
You've now got a portable MP3 player. This may be impeded if the people who make USB devices won't tell you how to talk with their CD or hard drive (or is it like SCSI and a standard?)
Wait, you can do that in Linux too :)
esound + alsaplayer + ALSA
My PII 233 can just barely make it at 9 mp3's playing simultaneously. After that the distortion and CPU usage is too large/high.
-adnans
"In short: just say NO TO DRUGS, and maybe you won't end up like the Hurd people." --Linus Torvalds
I am a hardware guy and happy it was posted. There are many possibilities with a programmable device that hangs off the computer.
:)
I have always been interested in DSPs as they can do some serious number crunching. The evaluation board they have has space set aside for prototyping and even more fun.
This would be fun for the box that has no sound card. Perfect for the workplace.
Not a flame, it's just that I don't think that you realize the enormity of the project.
Bad ideas for senior projects...
I remember when we were picking senior projects, we had to use a Z80 8-bit CPU to drive outputs based input in a useful manner. Well, one classmate wanted to use a VGA controller as output. Whoa. We had wired up a simple memory mapped CGA chip for earlier projects, but he was picking a design goal he had no experience with. I doubt he knew VGA was more than just simple memory mapping to draw stuff. This was to be done in one semester. From what I hear, he was still making excuses after a year trying to get it done. Quite sad.
Then there was the guy who committed to a floppy disk copier. He got smart and scaled down his project to something that would "test" the floppies by clicking down the tracks and checking for activity on the data. He passed.
Rule of projects: Keep It Short and Simple.
My project was a bit easier building a digital sampling oscilloscope, because I was able to cut and paste previous code from working earlier projects.
Nowadays you can DMA to your parallel port, so that it doesn't touch the CPU at all. It depends what protocol the device uses though -- you can't DMA things other than ECP and normal 'compatibility mode', in general.
The reason that the Zip driver is slow is that the Zip drive doesn't use interrupts. There isn't really a lot of getting around that.
You can DMA to modern parallel ports.
And while you are at it, you might as well port the rest of Linux to the PIC... :)
Not a flame, it's just that I don't think that you realize the enormity of the project.
This sig washed every five years whether it needs it or not!
This is just what I've been looking for. If and when drivers are ported to Linux, I'll snag one for sure. I've got an old Compaq 486 laptop running Suse 5.3 like a champ, but there's no built-in sound options. Sounds like this card/adapter would let me play mp3's from the laptop.
I hear people complaining about the low bandwidth of the pport, but I think they must surely get around that by buffering, so it's a non-issue, me thinks.
If I hear a favorable response from someone who gets one, I'll grab one too!
We don't have soundcards at work, but this would make that irrelevant! I could also cranks mp3's at parties w/out having to lug a big system around.
Kewl!
**>>BELCH
When using this to listen to MP3's, your soundcard is free. I still haven't figured out how to make more than one piece of software use my card at the same time
With this I can actually play a game with it's effects _and_ listen to MP3's at the same time. Neat...
"Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative."
I have a NETQue ethernet to serial & parallel print server. I wonder if I could use lpd to stream an MP3 over ethernet to my print server and out to the MP3 decoder. Any thoughts?
i'm not quite sure, but when you stream somthing out of your parallel port, dosent it EAT your cpu? all i know is when ever i use my parallel zip drive to transfer a 10+ meg file, i might as well get something to drink, drink it, go for a smoke, then come back to use the computer again. i can just imagine those mp3's made from cd's without any tracks, where the mp3 is 50+mb.
:)
then again, i could be wrong...
Well, those of us who run BeOS have that functionality allready.. Be mixes sounds on the fly, and provides you a mixer for each input. Last night i checked, and i had 14 channels of sound being mixed together. Each sound for BeAIM has its own channel, and so I can set them to have their own relitive volume. I had the sound from Snes9x, a CD, BeAIM, and, just for the hell of it, an MP3 all playing at the same time, and if the system had wanted to let me know, it could have beeped at me. At times, ive had 3 mp3's all decoding at the same time, playing at diferent speeds. It sounds funky, but its a good demo of what the BeOS can do. Oh, i have a K6-2/400 if you were wondering.
--Dave
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology
Hmmm, I know it's just cruelty to you guys, but playing mp3s (stored across NFS) uses less than 1% of my system CPU time, and 3% of my RAM (X11amp I'm talking of here). Needless to say, I can do all kinds of cool things whilst listening to completely uninterrupted music. Like I can have five smooth Mesa screensavers running in windows, be compiling the latest Gnome CVS, writing emails, playing with the GIMP and Blender, etc.
But hey, it's no fun for me to just brag about my dual processor beastie. I also wanted to suggest a point that surely it would be cheaper to upgrade your computer than it would be to get all that mp3 specific hardware? I mean, for US $800 we build dual Celeron boards running at 450MHz (or 504MHz if you wanna match a dual PIII 500) _with_ 128MB RAM. Now that's top of the line. Surely you could get a Pentium 200 or a low end PII second hand for a couple of hundred dollars?
Hmmmm... combine this with one of those ultra miniature computers and customize your own portable player; may look a little ho-made and cost more but you can make it anyway you want and learn a bit in the process.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
sounds cool if you have a 8086 or something that can't handle a 160kbps encoded MP3.
Actually, my P60 (yes, I know it's outdated but I'm a broke student) can only just keep up, provided it's doing nothing else, on a good day, in a following wind etc.
Even moving a window around on screen screws up playing MP3's :-/
This looks like a build-your-own-MP3-decoder-board kit. Neat, if you're into building hardware yourself (I was a while back). It looks like they have moderately general-purpose chips for this and boards with sample layouts that you can buy if you don't feel like designing your own.
AFAICT, this is intended as a neat hardware project for people who like building their own hardware. See my previous message for other possible uses.
Actually, this would probably be more vulnerable to noise, as the board won't be very well shielded and the parallel cable *certainly* won't be.
AFAICT, this is a kit intended for people who like hardware projects, and that's about it. I suppose that you could build a portable MP3 player with the parts if you wanted to (if you also bought a microcontroller chip and maybe a flash card reader). Hardware MP3 decoding would be useful on sound cards if it isn't there already, but that would be integrated into the sound card ASIC instead of added as discrete components like this.
That was pretty much my thought.
I normally have a high aversion to any pages with blinking text. It's quite a struggle to remember not to press the back button right away.
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
Some soundcards under Windows 95/98 can do this.
:(
My Monster Sound M80 could for instance.
Using E, I believe you can do something like this
(using esddsp). I wish Linux had support for the M80, it's a bit old but still an amazing card
I don't think that's true. From what I can tell, this hangs off your computer. Your computer has a fairly recent, powerful, and expensive chip in it. Therefore, you'd have to do a bit more to this board. However, if I misunderstood you, and what you really meant was that you could modify the circuit so it has a 486 or something built in, plus a power supply, etc, then maybe you could.
Switch the . and the @ to email me.
Could we get one of these with a digital audio out port? You know the kind I'm talking about, the optical ones found on some cd players. If such a device does exist, then I can hook it up to my MiniDisc recorder and put my mp3's on md's without the noise I get when I use a regular line cable (which is what I've been doing). Maybe it can transfer track marks too. Any info on this would be greatly appreciated.
Dysprosium
Hmm....I'm no audio expert here (not even close), but according to the manual, I have 3 inputs: a mic, a line in, and an "optical (digital) mini-jack." The Sony part #'s for the appropriate optical cables to hook it up to a cd player, etc. are POC-15AB, POC-15B, and a few others. Hopefully this will be of some help, but, like I said, I'm no audio expert. For all I know, you could have just asked me what OS I run, and I replied that my case is black. :)
Dysprosium
but that would be integrated into the sound card ASIC instead of added as discrete components like this.
Most sound cards I've seen lately (actually, all of them) use a DSP. So the MP3 enc/dec would just be another DSP program.
IBM's Mwave DSP already has MPEG audio support (it does work, but it tends to make the DSP crash. A DSP crash is no fun because it discos your modem.)
--jon. Postel is dead. May we all mourn his, and our, loss.
This would only be with old ports. With the newer EPP and ECP ports, I believe the limit has been raised to about 2 megabits.
- "Well?" "Deep Subject."
While reading what the product was, I had a thought: What if soundcards started offering hardware MP3 com/dec as standard so that using MP3 audio would be more appealing in apps (read: games) where CPU usage is precious to begin with? I know there were a few 3D game engines that supported MP3 for background music and I know the now defunct crack.com 3D game was using MP3 for it's music. Probably wouldn't happen, but if it did catch on, it would be one more nail in the coffin for record companies.
USB hardware is cheap, but I've heard that
USB drivers are a real pain to write.
but doesnt the parallel port lag the CPU too? it really would have a better use as a stand alone mp3 decoder device hooked to a simm pc..... it would make the cpu bog even more then it does... now if they could make one that hooked itself to a network......
-- There's only one replacement for displacement.....
Hmmm, I'm tempted to get one of these just to write a kernel driver for it. Imagine playing mp3s with: /dev/mp3
cat song.mp3 >
If you're running Linux (dunno if it works on other unices), use Esound. It's used in gnome and is a daemon that mixes multiple audio streams before it hits the sound card. It even works with most programs that aren't esd aware with a wrapper script.
"Hmmm, I know it's just cruelty to you guys, but playing mp3s (stored across NFS) uses less than 1% of my system CPU time, and 3% of my RAM (X11amp I'm talking of here). Needless to say, I can do all kinds of cool things whilst listening to completely uninterrupted music. Like I can have five smooth Mesa screensavers running in windows, be compiling the latest Gnome CVS, writing emails, playing with the GIMP and Blender, etc."
:), stuff like that.
/dev/dsp and /dev/dsp1, and handles mixing itself with low CPU usage. Matt
Nope, sorry. X11Amp does a *very* good job of hiding it's CPU usage from top. I am (err... was) writing an mp3 visualization program (some of you may remember downloading it from freshmeat, deciding it sucked, and deleting it... it was called Flashback and I've stopped working on it) that used x11amp plugins for mp3 decoding and sound output. When it was doing nothing but this, through the plugins, top would register the CPU at 99.9% free. Top doesn't provide a *true* view of the CPU usage, but it's close enough. Problem is, it's easy to hide CPU usage from it. I don't know if this was because the mp3 code was in a different thread or what, but it didn't show up in top. Using an mp3 player such as mpg123 which doesn't hide itself from top (although I'm sure x11amp doesn't do this on purpose) shows the CPU usage at closer to 8-9% on my machine. That said, I can play an mp3 and quake 2 with sound, mixing done in software, and have quake not lag one bit, on a 350mhz P2 with 64 mb of RAM. Other than for sound quality, there is absolutely no point in using one of these bitches in a newer PC. Although they have great potential for older PC's, embedded devices, wasting time
By the way, if you want to play 2 sound channels at once through one sound card, get an Ensoniq AudioPCI es1371 (don't think the es1370 will do it.) The Linux driver provides two devices,
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
I found out some programs (like rvplayer, xwave, etc) don't like the es137x driver. Rvplayer seems to distort a little and xwave just doesn't work (complains about 256byte buffer)
.au files like you can do with most sound cards (i.e. cat file.au > /dev/dsp), and implementing it without breaking the mmap() interface would be very difficult. Since Quake 2 uses mmap(), the authors decided to keep it the way it was because they thought it was more important. It was :-)
This thread was a long time ago, and I'm not sure if you're gonna see this, but I read in the kernel source docs why this is... the es137x chipset doesn't support directly playing
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
When you encode an MP3 you do so directly from a raw file ripped from a CD. Not a wav file. So You shouldn't get too horrible of a loss. Assuming that the mp3 writes its info the the MD with little to no loss and noise, it might not be as bad as you think.
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
My brother's hobby is audio, and I will ask him about it and search the net a little bit; my hobby is electronics, we make a good combination :)
Anyways waht kind of digital audio in does minidisc accept? S/PDIF ? Fiber? if you can tell me what it is called I will ask my bro and look around the internet and electronic catalogs I have.
James
The SoundBlaster Live! has a daughter card with SPDIF ports (and an internal CD-SPDIF port). I'm really satisfied with this card, but I dunno how this will work under Linux.
-= Scanline =-
"But I'm still like a little kid, see?
I just don't know when to quit."
- Rei
A while ago Slashdot had a feature on that Linux "box" the size of a matchbook that was a fully functional webserver - could these two things converge? Did that itsybitsy have a parallel port? Or could the decoder be altered to accept Ethernet (which I believe that boxlet had). Could just implement a direct-connect to the motherboard...
Of course, by the time that game eventually ships, that may not be news. (given the seemingly perpetual development time and rotating development teams...)
Lotek---
We need more hardware postings, the community gets a little stale talking aboput the same thing all the time, and there are non-software nerds out there, too...
Dub
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
Well, actually that was just what I was going for: a cool idea.
But regarding the cdrom: wouldn't a parallel-port cdrom be a solution for the lack of IDE of SCSI connectivity?
Anyway, it's nice to think about this as a neat gizmo, but that's it as far as I'm concerned.
The uClinix simm costs about $150 if I'm not mistaken, add to that the cost of the decoder board (which I can't check because their webserver mysteriously seems to be having a hard time) and various other expenses and I guess you'd be better off buying a 2nd-hand computer... or real audio equipment.
How about putting one of those uClinux simms in your old cdaudioplayer (after removing all the old junk from the inside...) and hook a leftover cdromdrive and the mp3 decoderboard to it?
;-)
Now your cdplayer can play music-cd's, read data-cd's (filled with MP3's for instance) and do something useful with it and you can even hook it up to an ethernet to get your music from!
Oh, and you could brag about which kernelversion *your* cdplayer is running...
I already have dreams of my compact disc player sending SNMP traps when it's done playing another CDR filled with MP3's!
I personally think that it is a Good Thing. You can now take off the intensive cpu load of decoding Mpegs. I don't know about all of you, but running 95/MacOS/98/Whatever and whatever flavor of Amp on a less than 150Mhz system causes computers (in my experience) to be sluggish. And even on moderate range computers, it can bog down your computer by eating up cycles.
-Zen I'm gonna make the _world_ my bitch.
This is all great, yanno, that we can offload
:-) It'll make your box take a performance
this kind of processing to ASICs specifically
designed for the purpose. But any large, regular
movement of data still eats up bus bandwidth.
100Mhz system buses are becoming more common, but
the PCI bus is actually beginning to have its
bandwidth eaten in huge bites (pardon the pun).
Surely a device of this kind is best connected via
a channel of FireWire bandwidth? But back to my
point about PCI... FireWire is implemented on
certain motherboards using a PCI-to-1394 bridge
chip... what do we do when the PCI bandwidth runs out?
hit of some kind.
Bruce M. Simpson Unix/Network Bod & Win32 Developer
I could use a serial cable running from my (noisy) server in the attic down to my living room stereo. The decoder is connected to the stereo. Now I can play MP3's on my server and hear them on the living room audio. I could control the server with a laptop in the living room or maybe some remote control solution.
Quite nice, although I would prefer an ethernet based decoder, that could have some other applications as well. Also I wonder if a 128 Kbps stream would run well over my serial ports.
Unfortunately I'm no good with hardware kits...
I have talked to the company
here is what it is.
think of it as a proccesor and sound card on a board that connects to your parallel port.
it DECODES the MP3 and proccess the audio.
in other words you need it if:
1)you want to play mp3 files on a 286,386,486 computer
2) you want to play mp3's on a pentium computer and still have proccessor power left to do other things. (like play quake to your favorit MP3 tune)
If you tried to do this by useing you computer to decode the MP3, the game would be so lagged it would be difficult to move.. Try it (not if you have a dual 500!)
3) it comes with source code... you could turn it into a sterio component for your sterio system with that old 486 25 MHz MB and chip you have laying around....
4) put it in your car with that old 386 MB you have laying around!
5) show your freinds your 'gizzmo' and watch themn drool.
6) if you are any good at electronics you should
be able to interface some type of CD-rom or HArdisk/ or other storage(flash?) to it for a completly stand alone player..No pPC required.
I want one.
Gopher0x
Instead of putting a pentium plus system in your car you can use a low end processor
or even an imbedded microcontroller with this board. No power problem like you
have with a standard pc motherboard.
I've been looking for this for a while. I'd like to get a PIC programmer, write a cdrom driver in PIC assembler, and build an mp3 discman type unit...
I think its a great idea to have a decoder off-loaded from the CPU. An ENCODING option would
.mpg file. Because it is a dedicated encoder chip, it is much faster and efficient than capturing uncompressed .avi files and re-encoding to mpeg - all with the CPU.
be much better.
Currently I am using a "Dazzle Digital Video Creator" which is an parallel port video capture device. Basically it is an MPEG encoder - takes in any video source and writes out an
If this product ALSO did encoding I would be impressed.
Yeah, or grab an old 386 doorstop and give it new life as an MP3 jukebox...