ACA1230/56 - what's the deal?

[Crumb]

I want my Amiga to be capable of playing stereo MP3s, at the moment I can just manage mono.

A 030 won't be enough to play 44Khz 128kbit MP3 in stereo. You would need a 060 in order to do that comfortably.

[Crumb]

you don't need a 060...a 040/25mhz can play mp3 in a perfect way

What do you understand as "perfect"? 22Khz is not "perfect" for me. With a 040/40 you'll reach 44Khz mono without problems but for usual 128kbit, 44Khz MP3 you'll need a 060 (and it will have plenty of power remaining available, I used to record CDs from mp3 at almost 2x IIRC)

[Crumb]

on a 040/25 you will reach 22khz stereo.. it is not perfect but sounds very well
anyways on a 040/40 overclocked to 50mhz will reach idem speed of the 060/50  
so your argument is not valid ...lol

22Khz doesn´t sound "very well" IMHO. Standard 040/40 certainly isn´t enough for playing 44Khz Stereo MP3. So if you want 44Khz Stereo MP3 you´ll need MORE than a 040/40: a 060 (OK, an overclocked 040/40 running at 50Mhz may be enough according to you but most 040/40 run fairly hot and although I know overclocked 040/50 exist I never used one)

[Crumb]

I've got at 1230/56 and I'm currently using Amplifier to play back MP3's via AHI (14 bit stereo FAST mode).

What kind of bit rate should I be using to encode the MP3's for my setup?  I grabbed a couple of 256kb ones ripped by Media Center on my PC and they sound pretty nasty.

Higher bitrate will require more cpu power (I guess) so try with 96-128kbits and 22khz stereo. It will sound pretty bad but at least your 030 will do it more comfortably. Try mpega.library replacement "libcamd", it´s supposedly faster. For AHI I used to like the 28Khz DMA 8bit mode (although it crashed sometimes I think) but if you want to avoid some resampling configure AHI to use the same output frecuenzy you use with Amplifier.


@retrofan
IIRC german folks from a1k.org produced a small batch, it would be nice if somebody found a batch of chips. It was a cool way to play mp3 with our miggies. Delfina is another solution

[Crumb]

@laserback

do you know what are the best 040/40 revisions? I have a WarpEngine and I guess it would fly at 50Mhz but it already gets pretty hot.

Yeah, SongPlayer is a very nice player. It requires less resources than AmigaAmp.

@Novacoder

If you use Amplifier configure it to use Paula (it's x-audio option IIRC) instead of AHI, as it's usually faster than AHI.

@utri007

is the software stable?