What would it take fron Amiga to play MP3

[Andrew1971]

As title says just curious because of the music capabilities

[Harrison]

A standard A1200 would not be able to cope with playing an MP3. An Amiga with at least a 68030 accelerator would probably be able to play them, but you wouldn't be able to do much else whilst they were playing. The basic music capacities of the Amiga is 4 channel 8-bit stereo audio split with 2 channels wired to the left and 2 to the right. You can get hardware to expand this to 16bit audio using a standard developed for the Amiga called AHI. This was a late sound format developed and used by later versions of workbench from 3.9 onwards, and also supported in the last games released in the later 90's, but you again need a fairly expanded Amiga to utilise it.

[burns flipper]

I used to play mp3's on my '060. I know that's overkill for your question, but they played just fine. I'm sure I had AHI set up on WB3.1, which gave me 14-bit output. There was definitely a 14 in there somewhere.

To create mp3's, I would have to first rip the .cda track to a raw sound file format, then use some free software off Aminet to convert to mp3. It would take 1 hour to encode 1 minute of song.

[Harrison]

I hour per minute using an 060? That is mad, but we do often forget how long we were prepared to wait years ago to do tasks we now take for granted as being performed in next to no time.

Think how fast you can rip a whole CD to MP3 these days. Or how quickly you can copy whole directories of files between drives.

This also reminds me of the early days of CD-R. Burning a CD on a pentium 2 in Win 98 or a Mac with OS8 at the time was very unstable and you had to close all other background tasks down, disable the screensaver or monitor timeout settings, close virus scanner, and then setup the disc to burn, click start and take your hands off everything and let it run. Moving the mouse could cause a crash or buffer underrun. And it was just as bad when the first DVD-R drives appeared. The software for those was even more unstable that with CD and authoring a DVD video disc was a complete nightmare. The other day I created a DVD in Adobe Encore and was thinking back about this. It used to take a whole day of trial and error in a program called DVDIt! to make a DVD video disc back at the start of the 2000's, and even then it might not work, and it would take hours to transcode the final production before even attempting to burn the disc. Now in Encore you setup your timeline in Premiere, select to export to Encore, it instantly appears in the timeline with chapter markers in place from Premiere, you add a menu easy which takes 10 minutes if you know what you are doing, then pop a DVD-R in and click build... 15 minutes later you have you completed disc. It is amazing the progress of computer hardware over the past 15 years.

[Stephen Coates]

My Amiga has played MP3s through Paula. It was an A1200 with 50MHz 68030 and 128MB RAM. I used AmigaAmp, set to 8 bit (and possibly mono). It worked, but sound quality was poor.

[Andrew1971]

Hi All
Well i am a little suprised that it can play no matter how low the quality of sound is. I seem to remember that someone said that you would need a minium of 100mhz processor to play MP3's. One down now the next one. Playing DVD's :yesyes:
Many Thanks
Andrew1971

[J T]

It is amazing the progress of computer hardware over the past 15 years.

Plus, the DVD will happily burn away while also torrenting and web browsing, and other stuff too probably...

I'm still amazed at how much more powerful a modern smartphone is than my first PC, or even the laptop my wife had when she was at uni. Staggering.

[Harrison]

Definitely regarding smartphones. We have mobile devices now that are far more powerful than the Amiga ever was, with so much different technology all crammed into a single little device. It is the sci-fi of our youth becoming reality. Today's smartphones can do so much more than even the Pentium 2 400MHz PC running Windows 98 I had in 1998. They are all mostly 1GHz these days too. That really does amaze me.

[Andrew1971]

Hi All
I just goes to show how good the programmers were/are to make use of such limited hardware. Nowadays anything below 1Ghz is simply to slow so not worh having.
And shows how sloppy some programmers are when you need lots of cpu power,big hard drives,loads of memory just to do something simple.
Many Thanks
Andrew1971

[Harrison]

True, although for the power of smartphones you could argue that the coders are doing similar things with them these days to produce the apps we are seeing. I'm sure a lot of the coders also started out on the Amiga or ST. And it is worth mentioning that ST coders had to be even better than Amiga ones as that system had to process everything though its 8MHz CPU, whereas for the Amiga, its CPU only needed to process data, and all video and audio processing could be passed out the custom chip set, which had DMA, so again no need to bother the CPU. So the ST had a huge disadvantage, but owners expected the same games and applications. Just shows how ahead of its time the amiga was.

[burns flipper]

I had to explain to my kids what cassette tapes were the other day. They were fascinated. For them, Blu-rays, smartphones and internet-everywhere is the norm, just an accepted fact of life.

[Harrison]

I'm wondering if I should force any children I have to experience technology in the order it was available, so to begin with they only have cassette tapes and some vinyl LPs to play around with, plus some truly retro consoles like the Atari 2600... the slowly introduce them to the 8bit computers and consoles, then the Amiga and 16bit era... and then eventually CD, the MP3... would be fun, and also make them appreciate everything a little more, whilst also gaining knowledge of the history of some common technologies over the years, where it all came from and why we have what we have today.

Children these days have definitely dropping into a world where technology has progressed far enough that they sometimes find it hard to imagine or understand how much we had to do before we got here. The concept of analogue devices like cassette tapes or record player and vinyl disks must really be confusing to a young child these days.

[Andrew1971]

Dont forget reel to reel and 8 track stereo :)

[J T]

Yeah but make them live in a cave and dress in animal skins first. Then slowly build up towards fire, the wheel, bow and arrow.

[Harrison]

Now you get the idea. Really make them appreciate modern living by the time they reach their teens. :lol:

[Andrew1971]

Tried to explain what a record was to a young relation 6yr old and said a BIG cd :lol:

[Harrison]

No wonder they don't know anything these days! ;)

[J T]

Now show them a laserdisc

[Harrison]

That will really confuse them! It did me when I first saw one in primary school in the early 80's. :lol:

[Andrew1971]

Laserdisc forgot all about that one. ive only seen them a couple of times :) yeah it would confuse them more. Who says oldies know nothing :lol:

[Harrison]

Could confuse everyone even more by getting hold of some ancient huge 8" floppy disks. I remember going to 6th form college in 1990 and my form tutor had some pretty ancient IBM PCs in this room (even by 1990 standards) and they had these huge 8" floppy disk drives. The things were massive and I hadn't seen that format before. It was almost like inserting a cased record into the drives.

[Andrew1971]

An 8" floppy now thars someting i never seen before. Does it look like record:)

[Harrison]

It looks like an oversized 5.25" floppy. Same design with the paper outer cover, so not that reliable or robust.

[Stephen Coates]

My college teacher said he has some 8" disks. Don't know if he has the drive that goes with them or not though. I'll have to ask him.

He did bring in some computer memory, that used lots of copper wire and tiny magnetic cores - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-core_memory.

[J T]

I hadn't read about magnetic core memory, I'll have to have a look at that.

Next... Punch cards?


Way-Dong Woo

*Chortle*

[Stephen Coates]

Next... Punch cards?


Way-Dong Woo

*Chortle*

Hehe.

He said he does have some punch cards.

[Andrew1971]

Dont forget about the computer made from good old glass valves. And took up several rooms the first central heating system :lol:

[Harrison]

My mum told me where she worked in the 60's computers came into their company for the first time and they were trained on it. That used punch cards for their ordering system and they had trays of them depending on what needed to be reordered. She hadn't used a computer since then until about 10 years ago when i helped her buy her first laptop. That must have been a bit of a difference to her. :lol:

[lakanman]

I have ACA-1231/42 MHz and i can't play mp3

[Kin Hell]

Imagine an 060 trying to re-code a 45GB BluRay Rip to .mkv format..... My 4.5Ghz Ivybridge manages about 3 minutes & 45 seconds. :eyebrow:

[Harrison]

What software you using to rip and encode from B D?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

[Kin Hell]

What software you using to rip and encode from B D?

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk HD

DVDFAB. Fully supports nVidia SLI Configurations for CUDA support too. :thumbs:

[Harrison]

I've not used DVDFab in a long time. Will have to check that out. DC gave me a copy of a commercial BD ripper he had finished with recently and I've successfully converted one disc, but not had chance to do any more yet. It's always good to try out and compare different programs though as I like to know what is available.

[Kin Hell]

Don't forget RE my claim for speed above, if you start re-coding the Audio as well, rather than doing a BluRay re-mux conversion as in the .mkv process, yeah I take about 26 minutes for a 2hr 10 minute film even with this monster rig.

One thing that is nice about DVDFAB is the Cuda support & Multi-Core CPU's; 7 of my 8 cores are banged real hard with that program. ;)