Comment by jepler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jepler | Hacker News Reader

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I'm relatively confident I had MP3 decoding software running on a 486 circa 1994/5. Even today, mpg123's website states "Plays Layer 3 in stereo on an AMD-486-120Mhz or (of course) a faster machine." and of course 48MHz ARM M4 microcontrollers can also play back MP3s.

cdda2wav seems to have existed by 1996.

the "quantum bigfoot" 1GB-and-up HDDs also in 1996 could hold several albums, especially if you ripped at lower rates like 64kBit/s.

I also recall exchanging MP3s on IRC with /dcc send, and am reasonably confident this was 1998 or earlier.

On the other hand, "On July 14, 1995, Karlheinz Brandenburg sent an e-mail announcing the .mp3 file extension had won a poll and announced that the old .bit file extension should no longer be used."

So while literally 1995 is early for people to have a "collection" MP3s on their home machines, the time before everyone had moved on _from_ Windows 95 sure overlapped with the mp3 era, especially for early adopters.

I recall 1997 being when every IRC-type person had mp3s and a cd burner. One was lucky to have a hard drive large enough to convert mp3s to wav files before burning. Otherwise you had to decompress "on the fly" and hope for the best. Could be done at 0.5x for higher chance of success, if I recall correctly.

I remember when the first burners came out that were capable of automatically resyncing and restarting after an error. I've forgotten the brand now, but there was one company that shipped it first, and instantly everyone in the LAN party scene bought it. Ricoh maybe? Burning anything was such a pain before that. Even if you took every precaution in the world, you couldn't stop a big truck from driving by and turning your burn into a coaster.

I recall a friend having a pentium 1 at 100mhz and could only play 64-128 kbps mp3's if he did literally nothing else. The song would skip from time to time and would immediately start skipping if you moved the mouse. From what I remember this was with winamp.

My first machine was a 100mhz Pentium; Winamp used about 25% CPU to play MP3s - I did it all the time while coding and hanging out on IRC. Can't think why your friend's machine would struggle with the same setup. Maybe older versions of Winamp were underoptimized.

I used Sonique for a while because it looked amazing - slightly poorer performance, but felt worth it. Later on, Sonique "optimized" for later Pentium releases and it became much too slow on the P100, so I switched back to Winamp.

Also, it still boots. :)

He was lucky he had a legit pentium, I had one of those cyrix CPUS that claimed pentium speeds, except the floating point unit was rubbish.

The only way to play mp3s was in linux where I shutdown every possible daemon and ran the decoder at the highest priority.

Here's a modern demonstration of decoding MP3's on various 486-class machines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zZpzxHSeM

Looks like they're all DX CPUs.

What's up with the socket? It looks like there aren't enough pins on the CPU, but they're used for the Pentium Overdrive.

Early mp3 decoders depended on floating point. Using modern fixed point code will let you run on less capable hardware.

The reference implementation is floating-point, for accuracy, but you can bet they were using fixed-point back then, as DSPs and such would be fixed-point only.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3 was released in 1995 and requires "only" a 66MHz 486, available in 1992.

I totally forgot about that one! I'm also unsure why I'm being downvoted for sharing software that dates back to '98

I remember our family's Mac, with a 68LC040 CPU, which was a 68040 without a dedicated floating point unit, could only play back mp2 files in realtime.

There was a program called "amp" that used fast integer math.

I compiled it on an SGI Indigo running at 30Mhz and it would play up to 256kbps files using 90 percent of CPU.

MIPS at 30Mhz is comparable to contemporary pentiums at much higher frequency of the era. The Indigo probably had faster memory, io and bigger caches than pc's mere mortals could buy. The comparison is simply not fair.

But this program called "amp"... I'm very curious to see if it could be compiled to run on a recent machine.

Let me see if I can track it down...

I agree with you, but 30Mhz! That is a very low clock for 256kbps decode.

MIPS did very significantly outperform Intel at that time.

http://www.mp3-tech.org/programmer/sources/amp-0_7_6.tgz

Found it.

An Indigo sat in the office for a time playing tunes from an NFS share we would populate. I eventually took it home to do the same thing. I forget how I parted ways with that old box.

I am not inclined to build it at the moment, though it may well make for a great micro controller project one day.

Nice! Still compiles with a minor modification: added a break on the default case of a switch. Time signature is wrong when playing though.

Edit: Fixed: add "frequency = frequency/2;" after the comment /* Set the output frequency */ in file audioIO_Linux.c

Cool! I liked the quality output of that player at the time. Highs were clean.

Does it still hold up?

Maybe I will build it just for grins myself. Thanks for the tips.

I can't critically evaluate the quality since I have no high quality mp3 nor Hi-Fi audio devices. An old recording of mine http://marcodiegomesquita.tripod.com/rda.mp3 sounded with very unsaturated bass; which is good, I think I recorded/mastered it wrongly or the software I used at the time decoded it like amp decodes it. It actually sounds really good with amp.

But yes, it uses very little cpu. Maybe less than dosamp.

I had similar experiences. Yeah, I need to build it now. Have a few tracks that often have watery highs, just not crisp. Amp played them great.

Maybe I will play your track after the family activities. Edit: Except access denied, lol. No worries.

Hugh of death likely. I can download it correctly from here: https://marcodiegomesquita.tripod.com/

Cool, thanks.

Slackware still has amp.

What version?

Slackware? 14.2

I was wondering about amp. Maybe a newer one exists? Sorry to be unclear.

It is available from debian archive: http://archive.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/a/amp/

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