New A-EON Music Card for Classic Amigas

[itix]

AHI is something we're looking at, definitely.
Datatypes aren't possible though, I'm fairly sure. An audio datatype has to convert its audio to an 8svx block of data, which the sound datatype then processes and plays back itself. The Prisma card plays the sound itself, it never converts the data, so there's no data to pass to the audio datatype superclass. I thought of faking the audio by playing the stream and  just giving it zeroes to play, but the datatype doesn't have control of its playback once it's returned its data so it'd be a bit useless.

You would have to hack it into sound.datatype. But then, almost nothing is really using datatypes for direct audio playback. Even just loading audio files via datatypes is extremely rare.

[itix]

so the almost only advantage of this card is that you will be to play your audio collection stored in some compressed format using a dedicated player? at least something like mpga.library should be thought of. or are we facing c64 future wehre everything hast to be statically linked?

The mpega.library is no use here. It is just a decoder that converts mp3 to a raw bitstream. Audio playback is still done in the player application through AHI or direct Paula.

Only sensible solution is writing a new dedicated player. It is not that much work. Real challenge is writing decoders for the DSP on that sound card. But writing some decent GUI and simple playlist system is piece of cake.

[itix]

then i dont see an advantage in this kind of device. it is like warpup, only making difference on very few dedicated tasks and everything tat wants to use it must be specifically recompiled against it. why not just buy a standalone $5 mp3 player instead? you can even place it somewhere weithin your amiga if you really must.. otherwise it gets seriously integrated into the system or let it be.

DSP decoders are more like a bonus than an advantage. It can be good buy if you dont have a sound card.

[itix]

Why does the existence of Vampire make offloading audio decoding from the CPU a bad idea? :confused:

If your CPU is fast enough you dont have to buy it because your CPU is too slow. Offloading decoding can be still good idea if you need saved capacity for something but advantage of CPU bound decoding is that you can use existing players.

In AmiNetRadio we never supported MASPlayer (similar to this one but it was just simple MP3 player) because it was not possible control output from application or use visualizers. Neither it is possible wrap this hardware to mpega.library because mpega.library is only for decoding while MAS Player and A-eon music card does both decoding and playing and reading back decoded audio data would be too slow. Both have advantages and disadvantages, Amiga audio output is limited to 8-bit only (or 14-bit, but that is sort of hack), while music cards use modern codecs.