Building a Spotify Player for My Mac SE/30 | Hacker News Reader

Building a Spotify Player for My Mac SE/30

68kmla.org

346 pointslaurentdc59 comments

This is interesting, but I'd call it more "using a Mac SE/30 to display what A Spotify client/player is playing."

I was curious about whether a SE/30 was actually able to keep up with decoding modern mp3 streams - I seem to recall newer processors than those running under significant load in the early days of Winamp.

Edit for relevance: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2672/why-...

Decoding MP3 requires about 24 MIPS on a DSP at minimum. On a general purpose CPU, a 66MHz 486 or 68040 can just about do it at quality. The Mac SE is nowhere close.

IIRC on a 486 DX/66 running Windows 95 you had to set Winamp to decode at half quality in order for playback to not skip (on a 128kbps file)

Yes, the fastest 486 systems could just barely do full-quality 44.1/16 MP3 decoding (DX4/100, etc) Even then a DOS player was a better bet than Winamp.

A SE/30 would be absolutely screwed.

As a comparison a basic home theatre pc these days with ryzen 1500x cpu, and GeForce 1030 fanless with GPU accelerated hevc in the video drivers, can decode up to about 350Mbps bitrate of HEVC 2160p 60fps using the latest VLC build. Beyond that it starts dropping frames.

edit: tests run using sample videos from here, if anyone wants to see what bitrate of 4K they can play back before it starts losing frames.

http://jell.yfish.us/

That sounds right - I think I could just push my 486 DX2/66 with Gravis Ultrasound to do 128kbps playback if I dropped into DOS and used Cubic Player.

On my Toshiba Libretto 30 I could get decent playback with the Fraunhofer decoder but not winamp, it was that marginal.

MpegDec is able to play MP3s on 68040 Macs (although with lowered quality settings and maybe even only mono). An SE/30 with an accelerator might be capable at really low quality.

http://www.jwgdesign.com/mpegdec/about.htm

My Amiga managed to do half-quality mono with a 40 MHz 030 under the bonnet (Hippoplayer IIRC). The 16 MHz 030 in the SE/30 would most likely not be able to do that in real-time, assuming that decoder isn't much more efficient compared to the MP3 datatype I used for the Amiga.

EDIT: Checked the web site. They're using the same encoder

I love thread like this where I can identify people's general age based on hardware they talk about. Ah daystar accelerator.

"Intel Inboard 386" and "Above Board Six Pack Plus"

I wonder how Opus compares, apples-to-apples on quality.

> using a Mac SE/30 to display what A Spotify client/player is playing.

It's quite a nice philosophical question who does the playing. Isn't the Spotify iOS app also just displaying what is being played by the iPhone ADC/MPEG Decoder/Network Library/Spotify Server?

Sure, but an iPhone CPU could decode mp3 easily. If the SE/30 CPU was decoding that would be impressive

Perhaps a touch too dismissive when a huge amount of work and ingenuity has gone into this. I use Spotify Connect on my phone all the time to control other players, it's genuinely very useful.

I don't think he was being dismissive; the title of this submission is deceitful. I also expected that the Mac would be doing the decoding and playing.

It's amazing how for granted we take such a task as decoding MP3s when (in the grand scheme of things) it wasn't that long ago we were using computers to do what seemed to be far more advanced tasks, that were unable to do something as "simple" as decoding a music file.

I have vague recollections of my first introduction to MP3 and thought at the time "this is definitely the future" and as soon as one of the first hardware MP3 players came out (MPMan? MP3Man? Something like that) I was straight on it.

Of course, it could only hold a handful of songs, I think it might have had 32Mb storage and had to be fairly choosey with what songs I'd take with me but it was brilliant, certainly for the time.

I seem to recall my second MP3 player was a Creative Nomad but I'm sure it would only play WMA files, there was something about it that ended up being a massive pain involving converting MP3 files and so didn't have it for that long.

Is it the Diamond Rio PMP 300 you’re thinking of?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300

That thing was awesome and really blew people away with how small modern electronics could be. Re-encoding mp3 files at 16kpbs (so you could fit a decent amount on the 32MB) made the music sound like crap but we didn’t care.

A lot of people think the Rio was the first commercial MP3 player, but GP seems to probably be thinking of the actual first commercial MP3 player, the MPMan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPMan

That was it! MPMan. It cost a fortune but it felt like the future.

Good feeling, it was the future! People still pay $400 for an mp3 player, but it's also a phone and a computer now

I thought Spotify used a proprietary codec?

Spotify uses AAC and Ogg Vorbis: https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/system_settings...

Anyone know if there was a change in quality when it was named "Extreme" vs what is now called "Very high"?

Back in the day I had trouble playing 128 kbit/s MP3s in Winamp on PowerPC 603e 75 MHz (Mac Performa 5200), so no way it can work on 68030

The title doesn't do the post justice. This is an amazing use of a vintage Macintosh and the technical details are quite interesting.

Its an awesome demo, but if you pay your own electricity bill old hardware such as this just isn't practical. At least not in my country with our energy prices.

The SE/30 power supply is only 100W, so it doesn't burn that much.

You're both right, but i see his/her point since I also have to pay my own electricity bill. A Raspberry Pi or similiar hardware will do this at an order of magnitude cheaper. Still, for romance reasons, I much prefer the solution in the article. Sometimes it's just worth the extra small bit of money for the romance

Ok, so I have always assumed that since a lot of this old hardware doesn't use anywhere near the level of cooling that a modern machine does, se/30 motherboard doesn't appear to bother with a CPU fan or heatsink, it uses a great deal less power. Am I incorrect in this, or is it all just the CRT?

Not sure why this was downvoted as it's a valid issue. For the last 16 years I've used some kind of Mac hooked up to a stereo receiver as a media server and had a similar concern.

  2002 - 2006 G4 tower
  2006 - 2016 2006 Mac Mini
  2016 - now  2012 Mac Mini

For music, the Mac Mini is used headless via screensharing. But it's set to never sleep because it sometimes doesn't wake up properly.

I'm always curious if an Apple TV would basically pay for itself over a few years with reduced power consumption vs having Mini with an 12TB external dual-drive running 24/7 (the drives do spin down on their own though).

edit: formatting

edit2: I did some rough math. Apple TV at idle (2w) vs 2012 Mac Mini at idle (11w) = 9w difference. At roughly $0.20/kWh the 32GB Apple TV 4k ($179) would pay for itself in just over 11 years.

Probably sooner because: 1. Electricity prices are likely to increase in the next decade. 2. Assuming the power usage difference is higher when actually playing/streaming music (given how bloated iTunes has become). 3. Even more power saved when streaming Netflix / Amazon Prime on Apple TV vs in Chrome on the Mac Mini (and up to 4k vs 720p on Chrome).

Totally valid point and I agree. There's a lot of nostalgia around retro/vintage but the truth is technology has improved in so many ways over the years. But again nostalgia is more a sentimental thing and seeing a Spotify interface in grainy pixels really hits me in the feels.

It’s built on Retro68, a gcc based cross-compiler for building classic Mac apps on modern machines: https://github.com/autc04/Retro68

This is so cool. I mean, I would've futzed around with HyperCard for 100 hours before getting half of this to work. Good job!

For all the posters that are going on about MP3 decoding, yes, we remember how decoding MP3s used to take up 80% of our Pentium 120 CPU cycles. Until MMX came along. Those dancing fab engineers saved our CPU cycles. Anyway, who knows how Ogg Vorbis would've decoded from Spotify back then - probably not well!

The major advances since then have been out-of-order instruction execution and SIMD instructions (although we still don't have general vector processors, as Hennessy & Patterson still lament in the 5th edition).

(My mother used to tell me I was getting a 486 instead of a Pentium 66 when I bas being a brat.. the terror it used to strike in me! unreal.)

The creator of this (ants) also made a classic Mac wifi extension which is also a brilliant little backport of modern wifi selection UI.

https://github.com/antscode/MacWifi

I’m more impressed by having WiFi on such a Mac rather than the Spotify client itself.

If you didn't see it, here's his walkthrough of how he did the wi-fi. Very cool!

https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/31078-adding-wi-f...

Practical? Hell no

Coolest thing I've seen in a while? Hell ya!

Good job on this, this is some awesome functional art!

I'd love to have this in my living room as the primary stereo, just for the aesthetic quality.

I'm afraid to start mine up without re-capping it. But, I don't know much about that. Any relevant tips?

With regard to OP, workaround for the "hug of death":

https://web.archive.org/web/20181219174629/https://68kmla.or...

P.S. I should probably also re-cap my Kaypro 2x. If the drives will even still work; what does one do about the belts and such in those? And what does one lubricate their rails and friction points with?

Sorry if this is too OT, but I figure this kind of story may attract people who know these things.

Finally, this coming year, I may be moving to a place that gives me space and energy to take on these hobby projects.

"The speaker itself streams and plays the music, and the Mac simply tells the speaker which song to play...."

I was unaware that you could now get speakers with that kind of horsepower built-in. What's their typical use-case?

Expensive, but looks like they do a lot: https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/speaker_systems...

Alternatively you could buy something like the Yamaha MusicCast WXAD-10. It’s a little Spotify Connect enabled box that you plug your speakers into and it has a price tag of about 140 EUR in Europe ($160).

I haven’t tested it or listened to it myself but the first and only review I checked was favorable.

https://europe.yamaha.com/en/products/audio_visual/accessori...

https://www.avforums.com/review/yamaha-wxad-10-musiccast-ada...

Likewise, a lot of AV receivers come with Spotify Connect these days. For example, Onkyo TX-NR585 ($380) which was recommended by CNET.

https://www.onkyousa.com/Products/model.php?m=TX-NR585&class...

https://www.cnet.com/topics/av-receivers/best-av-receivers/

That’s not to say that one should buy an AV receiver for this purpose alone. I only mentioned it because (a) some people might have a Spotify Connect capable receiver already without being aware of it or (b) they are planning on buying a receiver anyway and so might wish to consider this alongside their other criteria.

You could also use a chromecast audio, which should work with spotify: https://www.spotify.com/en/chromecastaudio/

It does... also got a google home mini that I use with it (was bundled in with something else I was buying). The voice recognition seems to be a bit better with Alexa though.

That's the path all streaming devices are going down now. Chromecast is literally a SoC - to stream web content you just pass across a URL and it handles the rest. You can get a range of speakers with it built in.

Quite a lot of sub-$100 speakers have Google Assistant built in and can operate entirely on a standalone basis pulling music in from Spotify with no other device involved.

I don't remember the last time I was this impressed by a post on HN.

Bravo!

This is absolutely amazing. I‘m extremely impressed with the engineering behind this, especially the details like the OAuth bridge or the WiFi adapter.

Just pulled my Mac SE out of storage. Great to see what the little machine can still do!

Why is the video muted?

Smart. I was just about to go out and buy a CD and then I saw this YT video, I was thinking great! Now I can listen to Phil Collins for free!

Then I realised there was no audio. So I went and purchased the CD and now I realise how immoral it would have been to watch this video without paying the artist's record label their fees. Phew

Super cool! I’m a little surprised nobody has backported a TLS implementation though.

I'm personally maintaining mbed TLS for classic Mac (68k included) for use in a libssh2-powered SSH client (an update of MacSSH). It works well on PPC, but I haven't benchmarked it on a 68k Mac yet. Without any optimized assembly, I fear it might be really slow.

https://github.com/bslabs/mbedtls/tree/macos

Oh cool, I knew there had to be one. The Spotify responses should be pretty small other than the images, so unless the handshake was really expensive it might be ok (small key sizes?)

Doesn't TLS kindof have the same issues as MP3 decoding? IIRC, there are YT videos of modern linux being installed on something as old as AMD '586' processors (somewhat inbetween a top-of-the-line 486 and a first-gen Pentium) and SSL/TLS turns out to be a CPU hog.

Amazon's music player has no ability to download music to your pc.

Just watching civil war and wonder why Spider-Man collect a mac/se. Can it be used today? Here it goes.

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