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It was Windows Media (WMA) at the time.

Ah yes, should have guessed. WMA was pretty big in the early 2000s. Around 2004 I even had access to the official wma source from Microsoft.

Spent about 4 months porting and then optimizing the wma decoder on a proprietary very-low-power dsp. It was hard work, but I got it down to about 12mhz for real-time decode on the dsp. The product this was intended for was going to be powered by a watch battery - hence the extreme optimization requirement. The source code, as received, used to consume ~400mhz on an athlon iirc. But with a lot of assistance from the dsp hardware and 4 months of elbow grease it could decode in less than 12mhz - for some profiles. Insane codebase!

Ah, I would have loved to see that. Never got to, even though I was a Windows Media MVP, I was NDA'd to the Moon, and I was the main tech guy in exec level meetings at Microsoft about Windows Media and the company I was working for was probably the biggest user of WMA in the world.

I wonder if the decoder source is in the Windows source code leaks? I guess Windows Media Player source will be in there. That'd be worth a look for me to see how utterly horrible it actually was.

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