Would I be able to play MP3s with an 030?

[Karlos]

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...

[dougal]

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.

[Karlos]

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.

[Karlos]

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

[dougal]

I never quite understood what AHI is .... is it an aditional hardware or soundcard?

[Vulture]

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.

[Karlos]

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.

[Lockon_15]

@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.

[DyLucke]

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.

[LoadWB]

@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:

[Thorham]

SoX, 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.

[Amiga_Nut]

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

[graffias79]

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.

[koshman]

Analog tapes over digital for longevity? You can't be serious...

[Hell Labs]

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.

[Vulture]

Hope kids in 2110 like whitesnake.

Sure they will, what's not to like?  ;-)