MAS Player Amiga AMP/AMPlifier MP3 Mixing ????

[leirbag28]

 Hi all.............I was wondering if it is possible to get continuous play of the MP3's without there being a Pause after each song ends?  I have a MASPlayer Pro and AMPlifier.

Is it possible?  or does the hardware need to be able to decode 2 MP3's  simultaneously to do this?  if so there should be MP3 decoders for Amiga that can decode 5 MP3's at once..............this is how it should have been from the beginning...at the very least 3 MP3's at once through hardware.  The same goes for MPEG1 or MPEG2 Decoders....2 streams at the minimum..........

anyway...any ideas how I can play continuous?  without pasting the songs together of course.

Maybe AMPLifier can HALF the rate of the MP3 playing and the upcoming one temporarily, until it fully begins the next song and blends it in..then raise it back to full quality.

I want to DJ with my Amiga Darn it!

[AmigaEd]

I don't think that I can specifically answer any of your questions, but would it maybe be useful to you to have two Amigas with MAS players. You could have one playing and queue the other up. Perhaps some simple script could be written that would even allow for control between the two Amigas via ethernet or serial cable.

Maybe overkill, but heck who wouldn't want two Amigas to jam on?

By the way can anyone tell me if the MAS palyer is still even available? All of the links that I've looked at appear to be dead.

Regards,
AmigaEd
 

[leirbag28]

 Well I am trying to do this on one machine.so that I can leave the machine playing at a party and not have to worry about pauses between songs..........as far as Live DJing, I guess I can use the CDROM and HippoPlayer with a little mixer....since the MASPlayer is connected to my CD32/SX32...and the MASPlayer has a separate Audio OUT which I can take into a mixer along with the CD AUdio OUT of the CD32 and the Audio from HippoPlayer or just Use the DSS8+ softwae for live effects and scratching :-)

[platon42]

It's technically not possible to generate gapless MP3s. There's always at least an empty frame at the beginning and the padding (to a full frame) at the end. There is an extension tag (lame generates this, if you want it to) for some software players to tell them about the real start and end of the sound to allow gapless playback.

However, with normal MAS hardware, you won't be able to avoid this gap completely, but you can make it as small as about 20ms -- but the player (AMPlifier) has to continue sending data right after the other track ended -- which it doesn't (no prebuffering for the next song).

And no, with the Hardware decoder, no mixing is possible. It just takes the unmodified mpeg stream.

[leirbag28]

Never Say Never!!

But anyway.check this out..something I had in my mind for a while.and now one actually exists!  except I was wishing for it for a stand alone eVIC commodore MP3 player.

http://www.numark.com/index.html?http://www.numark.com/products/product_view.php?v=overview&n=132

[adz]

I tried this years ago with a PC, I found a WinAMP plugin that allowed for seemless music play, it would buffer the last few seconds of the current track then switch to the next track and then mix the two. It worked, but sounded terrible as the tracks weren't, and could not be, timed properly. The only succes I ever had with a computer mixing MP3's was to use two sound cards and a mixer. You have two choices, hire some DJ equipment or put up with a 1 or 2 second gap between songs. If your gonna hire equipment, look out for Denon CD/MP3 players and a Numark or Pioneer mixer.

[leirbag28]

Wow I just discovered you can!  Using AmigaAMP.there is a plugin called CrossFaer which seems to do this......of course it doesnt work for me as AmigaAMP is kinda slow and crappy with the MASPlayer.maybe because of MHI?  why doesnt it use AHI instead like AMPlifier. and MASmpeg.device.

I think it would work better.  can someone port CROSS Fader to AMPlifier?

[Doobrey]

leirbag28 wrote:
  why doesnt it use AHI instead like AMPlifier. and MASmpeg.device.

IIRC, there's an MHI 'wrapper' library that allows any mpeg.device to be used with MHI aware programs,so you could use MASmpeg.device with AmigaAmp.

 But as Chris said above, you can't do gapless without converting to raw audio and mixing, which isn't possible on the MASPlayer.
 Maybe the best you can hope for is to use an MP3 editor and remove any 'empty' frames from the start and end of each track to minimize the gap.

edit: Found it mhidev.library

[leirbag28]

Thanks.....I just downloaded that MHIdev...but I think I already have it as my AmigaAMP already works with my MASPLayer.

and it skips alot, maybe because its going through another software and adding more CPU load?

Anyway about the cross fading.........Did you read what I worte above?   there is a plugin called Cross Fader for AmigaAMP that lets you start 2 instances of AmigaAMP and play 2 MP3s and fade between them. I guess that might require 2 MAS Players?  dont know.

Someone should create a MASPlayer that works from the Floppy port instead of the Parralel port......that way one can SOund sample muci clips from MP3's right within the Amiga! the Parrallel port is too important.

Also.this MHI thingy says one can decode MP3's using a CD32 FMV card??? I would love to see that.

[Piru]

@leirbag28

Someone should create a MASPlayer that works from the Floppy port instead of the Parralel port......that way one can SOund sample muci clips from MP3's right within the Amiga!

Uh, why not just decode the mp3 to direct sampledata?
 Decoding, D->A conversion, sampling, A->D conversion sounds a bit stupid to me when you can just decode the mp3 directly.

[platon42]

The cross fader needs access to the sample data the decoder generates out of the MP3 stream. This is not possible with the MAS Player (no audio data feedback, but directly coupled with the CS D/A converter), hence the cross fader plugin won't work.

The CD32 FMV card (BTW: That's where the mpeg.device standard comes from) can only decode MPEG 1/2 Layer 2, but not Layer 3 (which is normally abbreviated as MP3).

[leirbag28]

@Piru
"Uh, why not just decode the mp3 to direct sampledata?
Decoding, D->A conversion, sampling, A->D conversion sounds a bit stupid to me when you can just decode the mp3 directly"

Huh?  can you repeat than in elnglish please? :-D


@Platon42

Why can't the CD32 FMV  decode Layer 3?  isnt MP3 an audio layer from MPEG1 Video?  it is after all called MP3 MPEG layer1.

WHats the difference in quality between MP2's and MP3's?
is MP3 just more compressed and smaller? or is it better sound?


EDIT:  Mr Platon42..I almost forgot to ask..where you the guy that showed me how to use the MASPlayer from CLI?

What were those commands again?   I have the MAS pro...i remember someone saying that the commands are slightly different.   I want to be able to ply MP3's without using AMPlifier or AmigaAMP, so I can run them from SCALA.

[platon42]

@leirbag28:

At the time the CD32 FMV was developed, there was no MPEG 1/2 Layer 3 (or at least it was not popular at that time (1993?). The FMV unit was designed to play back video CDs, which used MPEG1 streams (and this included only MPEG Layer 2). Layer 2 can be encoded much quicker, but needs a higher bitrate for the same quality as Layer 3.

And about MP3s: it really depends on your settings (and the encoder used), you can encode MP3 with 256 kbit/s that sound like crap -- and at the same time generate (VBR) MP3s with <100 kbit/s that sound very close to the original.
(And yes, I think of doing a good encoding job as a kind of art, and most of the stuff you get from the internet is crap, broken, bad quality, truncated, no ID tags or spelling mistakes, so I do the encoding from original CDs myself ).

BTW: Somebody want a LAME3.97beta binary for MorphOS?

[leirbag28]

@Platon42

Hey?  what about those MAS CLI commands ? :-D

[platon42]

@leirbag28:

> Hey? what about those MAS CLI commands ?

MASPlay ?

Not sure what you mean exactly...