Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: sim085 on February 15, 2010, 04:15:57 PM
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I was wondering, would it be possible to play mp3 music if I install an 030 accelerator board on my A500?
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http://www.mediaarchivesystems.com/PDF/MAS%20Player%20Brochure.pdf
With MAS-Player, yes.
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@ sim085
Probably at a reduced bitrate, and it'll eat all your CPU power, so don't expect to do much else at the same time.
@ Amiduffer
That's not the Amiga MAS Player...
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I was wondering, would it be possible to play mp3 music if I install an 030 accelerator board on my A500?
When you install 030 in that A500, try Prayer it's a very light app. You'll have to of course reduce the quality. But it's possible to play mp3 using 030.
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Certainly possible for the heck of it. Makes sense for actual listening to music? NO! It sounds like **** through the native Amiga output.
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I was wondering, would it be possible to play mp3 music if I install an 030 accelerator board on my A500?
Good luck finding an 030 for the A500!! :lol:
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In software? At normal MP3 settings? The answer is a resounding NO!
You need a hardware MP3 decoder (http://www.mas-player.de/cgi-bin/mas.pl?site=mp3_hardware). But really why bother?
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But really why bother?
The question just popped to mind because I think one time I read that you need at least an 030 to play mp3's. Real and truly I am mostly interested to play good 'quality' music on my A500. However do not really know what the limits are. All I know is that at the moment with a stock 68000 it really sucks :) and wanted to see if an 030 would make it better in any way (maybe by allowing me to store music in some other format).
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Apparently, playing WAVs is much easier on the hardware, because it doesn't have to the decoding, and they should play fine even on 68000 or so I've heard. If you've got the HDD space...
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sound cards are really necessary for mp3s. Paula is great for synth, recordings not so much.
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sound cards are really necessary for mp3s. Paula is great for synth, recordings not so much.
Using 14 bit mode on the Amiga works very nicely and gives good quality sound, but I doubt there's an '030 out there that can decode an MP3 and do 14 bit Amiga sound at the same time... Maybe you can do 14 bit with WAV or AIFF files with an '030...
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Well, 14bit is certainly better than 8bit, but "good quality" in absolute terms is stretching it...
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I liked playing MP3s through the internal speaker in the 3000T.
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I've played mp3's on my 030 50mhz, but of course reduced quality and mono sound is needed in order to make it work. As a result, sound is quite bad.
030 is too weak for playing mp3's, it is useles but for testing purposes or as a curiosity.
In fact to do what a 030 does playing mp3's you'll need a i486 on a PC. If you want to play music with fairly good sound quality you'll need at least a 060. In fact dedicated processors on MP3 players, have a higher clock rate, and they're specifically designed for that code, so an "all round" CPU at 50mhz is not a big deal.
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tbh if I was going to listen to music and use an amiga at the same time it'd just pop a tape in my stereo.
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I remember playing mp3s with "play" I think. I used to boot with no startup sequence and switch all CPU burst/cache on etc. and it was still pretty poor. If you are going down the accelerated route, consider an A1200... you can then go for 060 power and AGA. The Accelerators on the A1200 (esp 030) will be cheaper than an A500 030 I would think - the supply and demand equation.
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Well, 14bit is certainly better than 8bit, but "good quality" in absolute terms is stretching it...
I wouldn't agree. I used to have my Amiga connected to my stereo and used to play all of my CDs over SCSI via 14 bit audio. The quality was pretty good - with the exception of the CDs used to test audio gear, my audiophile friend could not tell the difference between the Amiga and a good CD player.
Considering how horrible MP3s sound, you're not losing anything at all by going with 14 bit Amiga audio over anything else.
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Or you can just use your windows or mac pc for that, freeing your amiga for more important tasks. See windows or mac ARE useful after all.
:)
Steven
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It depends on how you do it. i used a cobra '030 @40 mhz with 16 mb ram with a little cli script I found on aminet that brought up a requester to choose your mp3 and invoke lame to play it. I don't remember the settings for lame, but it sounded fine in 4 channels 8 bit stereo on the 1084. I also had Executive going as well. Thing is if I had a music player instead of the script to do it the cpu load doubled and there was no perceived improvement in quality.
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I did a little video of my 030 (A1200) playing MP3's over on youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VETGfJ9pjI0) (starts at 3:00). The sound quality is really crap though due to the video camera I was using.
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I used to use Jormamp back in the day. It was a very very very lightweight program.
Last time I played an MP3 on an Amiga was back in 2005.
I decided to give up :(
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With an apollo 68040 and 16 mbytes ram i remember i could play some mp3 mainly mono ones fine on my amiga.I remember i used a version of a program that looked like winamp.Nowdays with a 68040 amiga what are the options?Is there a more optimized version of programs to play mp3 ?Also since storage is unlimitied practically with large harddrives would i be bettter playing wav files on amiga than mp3 ?
I only want to setup to a ide to cf card interface a wb 3.1 installation.I dont want 3.9 or boing bangs,just a setup with mui,and latest sfs and whdload.Then on another ide channel maybe using idefix i could probably load a 160 gigabyte partition full with wav files right?
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tbh if I was going to listen to music and use an amiga at the same time it'd just pop a tape in my stereo.
Providing one finds the squeal of ancient cassette mechanisms and the crunchy crispy sound of tapes being eaten "music" (and if you're an industrial music enthusiast, you just might!) then that's a good solution.
I mean, providing one would want to waste their time tracking down a tape deck and a cassette to play.
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With an apollo 68040 and 16 mbytes ram i remember i could play some mp3 mainly mono ones fine on my amiga.I remember i used a version of a program that looked like winamp.Nowdays with a 68040 amiga what are the options?Is there a more optimized version of programs to play mp3 ?Also since storage is unlimitied practically with large harddrives would i be bettter playing wav files on amiga than mp3 ?
I only want to setup to a ide to cf card interface a wb 3.1 installation.I dont want 3.9 or boing bangs,just a setup with mui,and latest sfs and whdload.Then on another ide channel maybe using idefix i could probably load a 160 gigabyte partition full with wav files right?
I think the problem of playing WAV's on an Amiga is that the files will be very large and you might have trouble streaming them from disk (depending on file system used etc).
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Well, 14bit is certainly better than 8bit, but "good quality" in absolute terms is stretching it...
Not when you use a proper 14 bit calibration file with a properly down sampled 28000 Khz 16 bit stereo wav. That does sound good. It's absolutely essential, however, that you start with a high quality source, and down sample to 28000 Khz with a program such as Sox (Windows). Sox down samples properly, and in combination with said calibration file (CyberSound) the quality is definitely good (much better than you'd expect). Uncalibrated and/or no good down sampling doesn't sound so good, of course.
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SoX (http://aminet.net/package/mus/play/sox-14.2.0f-m68k), you say? :)
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With an apollo 68040 and 16 mbytes ram i remember i could play some mp3 mainly mono ones fine on my amiga.I remember i used a version of a program that looked like winamp.Nowdays with a 68040 amiga what are the options?Is there a more optimized version of programs to play mp3 ?Also since storage is unlimitied practically with large harddrives would i be bettter playing wav files on amiga than mp3 ?
I only want to setup to a ide to cf card interface a wb 3.1 installation.I dont want 3.9 or boing bangs,just a setup with mui,and latest sfs and whdload.Then on another ide channel maybe using idefix i could probably load a 160 gigabyte partition full with wav files right?
Well running amigaamp was your problem, cpu use would be double what it would need to be.
Not sure why people were having so many problems playing mp3's. I did it at 28 khz with the '30 and it sounded sweet. When I got my 68040 Apollo and overclocked it to 40 mhz, on productivity mode on my NEC 3d, I was ripping my CD collection at a 128 bit rate, and playing back in 14 bit stereo at 48 khz. Sounded brilliant. Especially played through my stereo amp.
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Yeah, well, I wasn't experimenting too much with it so it might be possible to tune it to sound just fine.
Not on a completely unrelated note - is it possible to output audio from Amiga through digital out on some PCI card in a Mediator? Or is optical/coax unsupported?
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Here is a video of my A1200 playing an MP3. Sorry for the crap quality.
The A1200 had a Blizzard 1230 and OS3.9, some extra ram and thats it. No additional hardware, and the software i used was built in to OS3.9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5IEXyazalE
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tbh if I was going to listen to music and use an amiga at the same time it'd just pop a tape in my stereo.
Tape? :lol:
Don't tell me. Your 030 macintosh could play 320kbps MP3 no problem whilst simultaneously solving a 1,000,000 particle n-body gravity simulation in realtime.
I used to listen to MP3 files on my A1200, with full graphic equalisation and 14-bit calibrated AHI with AmigaAMP output whilst working away all the time. Mind you, it was using a PPC to do the decoding...
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My 060 A4000 is very comfortable playing MP3's while doing all sorts of other stuff with no slowdown. Pity the Paula chip can't handle high bit rates or AHI.
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My 060 A4000 is very comfortable playing MP3's while doing all sorts of other stuff with no slowdown. Pity the Paula chip can't handle high bit rates or AHI.
On my 040, I found that AHI v4.3 was the pinnacle in terms of performance. Using 14-bit calibrated audio on that was never a problem. Later m68k versions of AHI were far more CPU hungry on my machine.
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Of course, if you have a free parallel port, you can play mp3 on pretty much any amiga with one of those dedicated decoder doobreys ;)
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I never quite understood what AHI is .... is it an aditional hardware or soundcard?
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If you manage to find an 030 accelerator for A500, you may download:
http://aminet.net/mus/play/TMLG.lha
http://aminet.net/mus/play/TMLGbugfix.lha
set AHI to Paula DMA, quality at lowest, frequency division 2, in TMLG prefs set all buffers to full and mp3s will be played quite nicely while doing nothing else on miggy.
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I never quite understood what AHI is .... is it an aditional hardware or soundcard?
It is a hardware abstraction layer for audio on the Amiga, much like Picasso96/Cybergraphics (collectively RTG) are for graphics.
The latter hook into the existing graphics.library to make sure that OS friendly apps that don't have unusual display requirements (read HAM etc) can open displays on the graphics card and render their interfaces normally.
Unfortunately, there was no similar audio.library for amigaos. OS friendly apps would allocate sound channels via audio.device and either play a sound then free up immediately or hold onto them until they are closed. Therefore, there was nothing that AHI could actually hook into, so instead it provided a completely new API. There is a device interface for high level apps that don't need fine control over the audio and a library level interface for ones that do.
AHI was, according to the author in his own docs, never intended to provide anything more than a stop gap until the OS gained proper audio hardware abstraction, but in the end, it became that standard itself.
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@sim085
Playing MP3s on A500 is a really bad reason to get a A500 accelerator :)
I'm sure you can do better.
BTW, someone said something about issues playing WAV on such machine. Well, I'm currently using lightweight DSOUND in CLI to play 8-bit IFF stereo conversions of WAV CD rips. Of course, only as proof-of-concept.
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So, after your explanations, should i assume Amplifier is much less CPU hungry than AmigaAmp? Maybe that's why i didn't manage to get on the stereo thing using that app.
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@sim085
Playing MP3s on A500 is a really bad reason to get a A500 accelerator :)
I'm sure you can do better.
BTW, someone said something about issues playing WAV on such machine. Well, I'm currently using lightweight DSOUND in CLI to play 8-bit IFF stereo conversions of WAV CD rips. Of course, only as proof-of-concept.
Problems with wav files? I was playing wav files on my unaccelerated 500 with Play16 same as what you are doing. I would use my friend's Windows 95 machine to rip a CD to 8-bit 11kHz stereo wav, and play it with Play16. I played around with other sample rates for large wav files, but stuck mostly with 8-bit 11kHz since that was pretty much the best I could do with IFF files after conversion. Also did well for file size, about 1MB per minute, pretty comparable to what I would get from a 128kbps MP3.
For playing with sound files, sox was (and still is) pretty darned useful. Mind you, the 40MHz 030 made things much better for me.
Ah, those were the days :)
These days I also shake my fist wildly and yell at kids to get off my lawn. :laughing:
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SoX (http://aminet.net/package/mus/play/sox-14.2.0f-m68k), you say? :)
If this is a simple port of the Sox I use on the peecee, then I wouldn't want to down sample anything with it, because it's too slow. Even on my old 550 mhz Pentium 3 down sampling with Sox isn't exactly fast.
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tbh if I was going to listen to music and use an amiga at the same time it'd just pop a tape in my stereo.
Music today is a load of pants, and has been for probably 15 years now, so stick to SUPERIOR MOD tunes and be grateful haha
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Cassette tapes only get eaten if the tape path in the deck is not kept clean.
Same thing with Reel to Reel. This is what almost all music recorded before the year 2000 was recorded on.
I will take analog tape for longevity over any digital format.
Anyway, on topic; I had a 40MHz 030 in my A1200 and the best I could do using mpega from the command line was 11.025KHz (Quartered) Mono without the audio stuttering. So instead I used mpega to decode the files to AIFF files and then played them using play16.
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Analog tapes over digital for longevity? You can't be serious...
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In a hundred years who says software that plays mp3s will still be compatabile with windows 70? Where as a tape deck would proabably be a school science project.
Hope kids in 2110 like whitesnake.
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Hope kids in 2110 like whitesnake.
Sure they will, what's not to like? ;-)
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On my 040, I found that AHI v4.3 was the pinnacle in terms of performance. Using 14-bit calibrated audio on that was never a problem. Later m68k versions of AHI were far more CPU hungry on my machine.
absolutely! even on the 060 is very light (less accurate, probably but better even with a RTA card)
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So the best option is use AHI v4.3 than 6.7?
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Analog tapes over digital for longevity? You can't be serious...
CDs rot, hard drives fail, flash memory gets corrupted. Unless in the presence of a strong magnetic field, analog tape will hold its contents indefinitely.
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I second that. As an audiophile into a quite diverse collection of gear, I can confirm that ALL of my tapes (especially the Maxell XLII-S and MX-S tapes) perform as well as they did when I recorded them in the mid to late 80's. Even after surviving years and years in a car throughout all of the seasons. ALL of my CD recordable media from the mid 90's to mid 2000's are ALL rotting and they were all recorded on high-end dedicated CD-Audio recorders and various computer CD-ROM burners using all different types of blank media. They exhibit a jittery/scratchy/distorted sound and I had to throw away about 90% of my collections. Thankfully, I was smart and wise enough to know something "was up" with digital technology - especially one that relies on spinning a plastic disc with pits of dye at ridiculous speeds and kept most all of whatever format I was hoping to "back up".
I've had bad luck with HD's, CF cards, SD cards and pretty much any of these solid state mass storage devices. Whereas my reel-to-reel tapes, old cassette tapes for a TI-99/4A, VHS tapes, and analogue audio cassette tapes keep on keeping on.
Digital sucks for audio and most of the world has been duped into thinking otherwise. If people weren't so lazy and enjoyed the convenience that digital media offers, maybe they'd learn to listen better and trust their ears.
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I second that. As an audiophile into a quite diverse collection of gear, I can confirm that ALL of my tapes (especially the Maxell XLII-S and MX-S tapes) perform as well as they did when I recorded them in the mid to late 80's. Even after surviving years and years in a car throughout all of the seasons. ALL of my CD recordable media from the mid 90's to mid 2000's are ALL rotting and they were all recorded on high-end dedicated CD-Audio recorders and various computer CD-ROM burners using all different types of blank media. They exhibit a jittery/scratchy/distorted sound and I had to throw away about 90% of my collections. Thankfully, I was smart and wise enough to know something "was up" with digital technology - especially one that relies on spinning a plastic disc with pits of dye at ridiculous speeds and kept most all of whatever format I was hoping to "back up".
I've had bad luck with HD's, CF cards, SD cards and pretty much any of these solid state mass storage devices. Whereas my reel-to-reel tapes, old cassette tapes for a TI-99/4A, VHS tapes, and analogue audio cassette tapes keep on keeping on.
Digital sucks for audio and most of the world has been duped into thinking otherwise. If people weren't so lazy and enjoyed the convenience that digital media offers, maybe they'd learn to listen better and trust their ears.
You are completely right about this "Digital sucks for audio and most of the world has been duped into thinking otherwise."
I trashed milions of cd-s and nowday allmost all of my DVD movie discs are also lost - they wont work anymore (my VHS/BETA video movie collection still works great) but there are so much HD movies out there now and we all have fast internet connections today so it's no problem!
;p
I also have a great TAPE collection that works fine as then and i also record LP's making compilations for listening at home... i m also a audiophile using all the best of '80 stuff like nakamichi, mcintosh, tannoy and vinyls for audio :)
My amiga 060 could only run shity MP3 (bljak) files in mono with "good"
quality and the one here that wrote "his friend could not hear the difference between mp3 and mp3" hahahaha must go to the doctor b/c i can hear difference between same audio CD's made from different audio companys!!! Normal people can HEAR differences if he JUST changes the audio cables in his system!
486 Pc's could only run stereo mp3 (128bit) at o/c speeds at 150/166Mhz.
:laughing:
that's why i did NOT use amiga for mp3, (i did only used mp3 files for my car b/c they was no good tape radios on the market) but you CAN use amigas for playing audio cd - that's not soo
bad depending at your home sound system!
cya...
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@ graffias79 & save2600:
Let's make it clear what we're talking here, guys. I'm not defending optical media (or anything else used for recording digital information) versus tapes. I'm talking about the principle of storing information as such - digital vs analog. Considering that I can make unlimited number of lossless copies of any digital content there can be NO doubt that it WILL last longer or at least has the potential to. When my tape dies, it's gone - I can make a copy, but it will be lossy and how many of those can I make while maintaining decent quality?
As for digital or analog being suitable for storing audio information, well, we all know CD limitations, but today with digital content distribution we are no longer limited to 16bit/44KHz. Now I don't know if SACD or DVDA or even higher rez formats sound better than good vinyl, but it is comparable at least. I have both a decent vinyl rig and SACD player and like both. Still I maintain that the biggest difference is always in the recording itself and its mastering - a well done redbook CD can sound miles better than a shitty LP.
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@ graffias79 & save2600:
Let's make it clear what we're talking here, guys. I'm not defending optical media (or anything else used for recording digital information) versus tapes. I'm talking about the principle of storing information as such - digital vs analog. Considering that I can make unlimited number of lossless copies of any digital content there can be NO doubt that it WILL last longer or at least has the potential to. When my tape dies, it's gone - I can make a copy, but it will be lossy and how many of those can I make while maintaining decent quality?
As for digital or analog being suitable for storing audio information, well, we all know CD limitations, but today with digital content distribution we are no longer limited to 16bit/44KHz. Now I don't know if SACD or DVDA or even higher rez formats sound better than good vinyl, but it is comparable at least. I have both a decent vinyl rig and SACD player and like both. Still I maintain that the biggest difference is always in the recording itself and its mastering - a well done redbook CD can sound miles better than a shitty LP.
Re: Would I be able to play MP3s with an 030?
YES with a sound card!
:laughing:
@koshman
"a well done redbook CD can sound miles better than a shitty LP."
YES it can today in the year 2010 and it cost at least 4000-5000 euros for a great and/or modified player, under that price tag NOTHING can beat
those shitty LP's as you say!
:roflmao:
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@ m4rk1z:
As if decent vinyl setup was cheap :D
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@ m4rk1z:
As if decent vinyl setup was cheap :D
Actually, in the astute audio world, it's well known you can invest in a much cheaper analogue rig and get much more satisfaction out of it than digital spent many times over. $350 for that new budget Rega is enough to blow away ANY digital player I've heard that cost less than $10k. Probably any digital rig at any cost. The two formats simply cannot sound like each other no matter how much money you spend. And yes, I currently have both SACD and DVD-Audio capable players. I like them for what they are (especially 2-channel SACD), but I'm talking in the area of imaging, realism. liquidity, smoothness & frequency response. No comparison to vinyl and the imaging especially is never right in the digital domain. If you have revealing enough speakers, you will find that the bulk of musical information in a stereo recording is squished and mono-like in the digital domain, whereas analogue allows the instruments to float beside, under, above and beyond your speakers.
AND... make no mistake about other formats that have come and gone. DCC for example. That's directly recording 1's and 0's to cassette and was, therefore, a true digital medium. So was the Adam tape drive technology from the 80's IIRC, that digitally recorded data to an analogue tape (metal formulated usually). And then there were a few VHS decks that had the ability to use their video heads, modulated in such a way as to record digital audio. Speaking of that, was the very short lived D-VHS medium (all digital of course)! All of these were superior technologies that went by the wayside partly because of the confusion the industries cast upon the general public during these ever continually volatile digital times. Nobody agreeing on standards and I also firmly believe they were quickly discarded because they are so long lasting. Every industry today wants you to re-purchase their goods. Over and over and over again. Anything that represents longevity must be cast out, else how are these greedy bastards going to continue to line their pockets for "innovation" or not? And that's what it's all about.
What we need and what I desire is a modern tape drive system one a consumer level with near-consumer replaceable parts (capstans, pinch rollers, belts) based on either compact cassette OR reel-to-reel so we can properly store our data or music - just like the big boys *still* do. What the Joe Sixpack consumer is sold today, is by and large, garbage designed to be obsolete as soon as you take it right out of the packaging. It's seriously flawed, sounds like crap, doesn't retain data for any real length of time and is essentially stripping people of the passion we once had for music, photography, gaming or whatever.
Take the photography industry for example. Who hasn't lost valuable pics yet thanks to the flaws inherent in digital storage? You can't accidentally "delete" a negative the same way. Not to mention all the pics that are purposely being discarded because, all of the sudden, everybody is an "expert" photographer and critic. Psychology behind this phenomenon isn't rocket science, but seems again - most people would rather not recognize or deal with it. At the expense of quality, it's simply too much fun snapping cheesy pics off your phone camera, listening to mp3's on a seriously small wafer and all the other silly things people get a kick out of today. The world is just rife with cheese I guess. :lol:
, yikes! Didn't mean to get so off topic... to remain on-topic, I would say that listening to a horrible format (mp3) on an Amiga is a futile exercise to say the least. Yes, it may be fun to play around with and experiment (did it myself) as that's always what it's been about classic computing wise, but to sit - even casually listen to music in the background like that, with horrible fidelity... your Amiga is better equipped performing some other worthwhile task. lol May as well just play a CD back using a SCSI CD drive for superior results. I spent $60 on an external USB soundcard for my 060/Deneb equipped Miggy and was still disappointed in the performance of both the audio AND the "multi-tasking" ability of the Amiga.
Anyone want to buy a SoundBlaster X-Fi that's like new in the box? $40 shipped within the U.S. :)
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@ save2600:
You obviously know more about these things so I'm not gonna try and argue with you :)
I'm not sure we're on the same page though - so this is: digital on tape x digital on optical media? :) I wasn't commenting/objecting on that, but okay.
Btw, you mentioned that your burned CDRs from the late 90s haven't survived, which seems plausible, but do you have similar experience with pressed CDs?
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@ save2600:
You obviously know more about these things so I'm not gonna try and argue with you :)
I'm not sure we're on the same page though - so this is: digital on tape x digital on optical media? :) I wasn't commenting/objecting on that, but okay.
Btw, you mentioned that your burned CDRs from the late 90s haven't survived, which seems plausible, but do you have similar experience with pressed CDs?
No, I was merely pointing out the various formats that have come and gone. Especially ones that combined the technologies: digital recording onto magnetic or analogue media. I felt those were the best of both worlds for their various purposes. Today, I'd love to see magnetic tape digitally storing my computer data and files. For audio, I did like DCC when it was out and I had a couple of decks. AFAIK, they (in a very unorthodox move for Philips, completely ditched that format and do not make blank tapes any longer!). VERY weird for them and I would have continued to purchase tapes had they not ditched it so quickly. They were not the greatest at playing back analogue though and their internal design (a drawer that sucked the tape in) was totally undesirable as I like to properly maintain my decks.
It is my long experienced opinion that recordable optical media sucks. Mostly for audio, but since it's so poor with audio, I'd expect computer data to suffer similarly. I have not experienced as many defective CD-R's or DVD-R's when using them for data storage however, but my experience between the two hobbies are damn near polar opposite. Within the past few years though, I have "burned" several DVD's for people and myself. Only time will tell how well they hold up. No way am I going to throw out my childhood 8mm film videos thinking my DVD's are going to last ;) lmao!!
My pressed CD's seem to be fine, no matter how old they are - but I am aware of the phenomenon called 'bit rot'. I have one CD where the aluminum from the spindle to its outer edge *is* rotting though, but it does not affect the sound yet and that disc was made in Germany and from the early 80's. I have lots from the early-mid 80's still - but I believe they need to be treated in order to sound or look (if we're talking DVD) their best (same as brand new CD's, SACD's, DVD's, etc.) by a device that collapses the static or electro-magnetic field that surrounds them as a byproduct of the manufacturing process. It's not the aluminum that holds the static, it's the polycarbonate substrate that does. Think about it. You purchase a brand new CD that hasn't has it's magnetic field collapsed. I forget the exact specs, but that same statically charged CD spins at revolutions of something like 200rpm to 900rpm. Static field is enough to screw with the optical pickup since it's focusing beam is comprised of a coil that allows the lens to move up and down vertically. When (not if) that lens is not projecting a highly refined and focus beam, the optical part that reads the pits is not reading them accurately. Now, this is when the error correcting circuitry comes into play. Do you think any man made mathematical algorithm can possible fill in the blanks to the missing data/music/pits? No way Jose and that's why there's been so many different error correcting "filters" throughout the years. Best solution is to have the least amount of errors so that the error correcting circuitry doesn't have to kick in as much. Another reason why, as an audiophile, you don't want to be purchasing used CD's from careless people ;)
Scratches aside, the absolutely best product I've ever used and continue to use to collapse the static field (and this field naturally recharges itself after so many plays - so you need to re-treat every so often) of a CD/DVD/SACD is called the Bedini Clarifyer. They have both a handheld unit and an "ultra" unit that has twice as much EM circuitry I believe. I have the handheld unit and I swear by it's effects both audibly and visually. On top of it enhancing the audio, it does wonders with video too. I've noticed the clarity more especially with newer films that have different mastering techniques (compressed digitally).
http://www.bedini.com/
...these can be found at your better audio salons and are one of a handful of 'tweaks' that truly work. I had a friend recently purchase a used Rush CD the other day. It was a gold disc Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab CD, but it refused to play in any of his machines and the disk looked mint! Knowing I might have a solution, he brought his disc over for me to try. Before treating it with the clarifier, I plopped it into one of my machines. It refused to boot its table of contents! Treated both side of the CD and re-inserted. Voila! Damn thing played. lol I was shocked that this device could/would provide such a drastic demonstration, but it did. Since then, I have been using it to treat any CD-R's I might make, just in case that was part of the problem with my discs from the 90's, etc. So far, so good. And no, I never bought the cheapest of the cheap of blank media. In fact, with a Harman Kardon & Pioneer CD recorder I once had, I was forced to purchase those expensive CD-Audio CD-R's. Regular CD-R's for use in a computer would not work with 'em :(
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You can play it at full quality but you have to decode the files to a "raw" file 1st.
Regarding AHI, I thought 4.18 was the best version ?
Couldn't find any 4.3 version on Aminet either...
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Interesting, I've never heard of this EM issue. I'll look into it, thanks for the link.
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Problems with wav files? I was playing wav files on my unaccelerated 500 with Play16 same as what you are doing. I would use my friend's Windows 95 machine to rip a CD to 8-bit 11kHz stereo wav, and play it with Play16. I played around with other sample rates for large wav files, but stuck mostly with 8-bit 11kHz since that was pretty much the best I could do with IFF files after conversion. Also did well for file size, about 1MB per minute, pretty comparable to what I would get from a 128kbps MP3.
Do you still have the version of Play16 you used? I have been trying to find a program that will play streaming WAV files from HDD/CF/SD on my A600, but the version of Play16 on Aminet is only for 020+.
I have already converted a bunch of my CDs to WAV files and I'd love to be able to listen to them through the A600, but at the moment nothing I have tried from Aminet will work. They work beautifully with Play16 and SongPlayer on the A1200 though.
As for playing MP3s on the 030, SongPlayer and Prayer are probably the best to use to get the highest quality and have nice GUIs and playlists. The biggest problem I've found isn't the quality settings, but the bitrate of some MP3s. 128-192kbps MP3s will play perfectly on low-medium quality settings, but you can forget about playing 320kbps MP3s at all, unless you decode them to RAW/WAV/8SVX first.
One thing that works well is AmiNetRadio, which can stream online radio and podcasts in real-time from the internet, playing at low quality on a 030, but it never skips a beat and continues to multitask with other Internet applications running.
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Actually, in the astute audio world, it's well known you can invest in a much cheaper analogue rig and get much more satisfaction out of it than digital spent many times over. $350 for that new budget Rega is enough to blow away ANY digital player I've heard that cost less than $10k. Probably any digital rig at any cost. The two formats simply cannot sound like each other no matter how much money you spend. And yes, I currently have both SACD and DVD-Audio capable players. I like them for what they are (especially 2-channel SACD), but I'm talking in the area of imaging, realism. liquidity, smoothness & frequency response. No comparison to vinyl and the imaging especially is never right in the digital domain. If you have revealing enough speakers, you will find that the bulk of musical information in a stereo recording is squished and mono-like in the digital domain, whereas analogue allows the instruments to float beside, under, above and beyond your speakers.
AND... make no mistake about other formats that have come and gone. DCC for example. That's directly recording 1's and 0's to cassette and was, therefore, a true digital medium. So was the Adam tape drive technology from the 80's IIRC, that digitally recorded data to an analogue tape (metal formulated usually). And then there were a few VHS decks that had the ability to use their video heads, modulated in such a way as to record digital audio. Speaking of that, was the very short lived D-VHS medium (all digital of course)! All of these were superior technologies that went by the wayside partly because of the confusion the industries cast upon the general public during these ever continually volatile digital times. Nobody agreeing on standards and I also firmly believe they were quickly discarded because they are so long lasting. Every industry today wants you to re-purchase their goods. Over and over and over again. Anything that represents longevity must be cast out, else how are these greedy bastards going to continue to line their pockets for "innovation" or not? And that's what it's all about.
What we need and what I desire is a modern tape drive system one a consumer level with near-consumer replaceable parts (capstans, pinch rollers, belts) based on either compact cassette OR reel-to-reel so we can properly store our data or music - just like the big boys *still* do. What the Joe Sixpack consumer is sold today, is by and large, garbage designed to be obsolete as soon as you take it right out of the packaging. It's seriously flawed, sounds like crap, doesn't retain data for any real length of time and is essentially stripping people of the passion we once had for music, photography, gaming or whatever.
Take the photography industry for example. Who hasn't lost valuable pics yet thanks to the flaws inherent in digital storage? You can't accidentally "delete" a negative the same way. Not to mention all the pics that are purposely being discarded because, all of the sudden, everybody is an "expert" photographer and critic. Psychology behind this phenomenon isn't rocket science, but seems again - most people would rather not recognize or deal with it. At the expense of quality, it's simply too much fun snapping cheesy pics off your phone camera, listening to mp3's on a seriously small wafer and all the other silly things people get a kick out of today. The world is just rife with cheese I guess. :lol:
, yikes! Didn't mean to get so off topic... to remain on-topic, I would say that listening to a horrible format (mp3) on an Amiga is a futile exercise to say the least. Yes, it may be fun to play around with and experiment (did it myself) as that's always what it's been about classic computing wise, but to sit - even casually listen to music in the background like that, with horrible fidelity... your Amiga is better equipped performing some other worthwhile task. lol May as well just play a CD back using a SCSI CD drive for superior results. I spent $60 on an external USB soundcard for my 060/Deneb equipped Miggy and was still disappointed in the performance of both the audio AND the "multi-tasking" ability of the Amiga.
Anyone want to buy a SoundBlaster X-Fi that's like new in the box? $40 shipped within the U.S. :)
Man! I m so happy that someone really knows what he is talking about, so i m not the only one here who thinks MP3 is music (sound) without soul!
:laughing:
Greatly explained about sound coming from 2 speakers making sound in the room like you where at the hall, not mentioning that you can also hear individual musicans sitting nearer or deeper back or at a different height!
;p
save2.6 have you ever tried to record music at VHS or better BETAmax?
I compared them against many cd players and the result was fascinating good!!! I also made some video backup systems to backup all my amiga stuff/discs to vhs tape also (on good high grade ones) for archiving them.
Yes they all work today like many many C-64 tapes that are older more than 20 years and works also very well, i made some copy units for making exact copys of tapes to have them just in case...
Sorry for OT people!
:)
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Don't analogue magnetic tapes get fungal growths?
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Don't analogue magnetic tapes get fungal growths?
Yeah, that's what happened to all my tapes. And floppy disks.
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All of your magnetic media? You must live 10 ft. from the ocean and have gotten your stuff contaminated somehow. :lol:
I have a buddy who's in the radio business that has scores and scores of tapes, 8-tracks, reel-to-reel ALL carelessly stored in his damp, dingy basement here in the Midwest - absolutely NO fungal damage at all to his stuff! And I know because I'm always down there searching for that diamond in the rough and bitching about the fact he never runs his dehumidifier!
I think there's a fungus among us.... lol
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Summer brings the humidity here in this area of Australia, it's permanently like a sauna outside for months on end. This is why everything goes mouldy, no matter how it's stored. The humidity just creeps in and grows mould on everything. I have picked up some lots of Amiga 500s that came with disks from other people and they're always covered in mould too. My whole subtitled VHS colection is useless now because of mould growing in them, thankfully I've replaced most of them with DVDs now. Mouldy floppy disks ruin disk drive heads, too, so I had to order some floppy drive cleaning kits from England to get them to work again.
Does anyone know where we can find an earlier 68000-compatible version of Play16 that will run from a 3.1 A600?
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That sucks Cammy!
Maybe some air tight plastic container solutions are in order for those that live near the coast or live in similar situations...
And Hell_Labs... quit being as ass already! Cammy just explained what the scoop is over there :mad:
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Yeah, that's what happened to all my tapes. And floppy disks.
Clean your house maybe?
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I just threw out about 300 disks because of the same problem. Florida humidity destroyed most of them. As careful as I was about my Amiga stuff, there was one summer that my gear spent in a non-air conditioned environment and that was all she wrote.