Comments on: Sound’s ironic

By: Some audio success « Motho ke motho ka botho

Some audio success « Motho ke motho ka botho — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 08:16:26 +0000

[...] the moc player, as I already knew, cleans up the playback, and that means basically that the interface itself is just too heavy for a [...]

By: A Debian server at 150Mhz, 32Mb « Motho ke motho ka botho

A Debian server at 150Mhz, 32Mb « Motho ke motho ka botho — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 12:01:07 +0000

[...] easily as one running at 550Mhz, but better than one running at 120Mhz or 100Mhz. (And maybe even 166Mhz, if that’s worth [...]

By: mulenmar

mulenmar — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:14:41 +0000

Hey K. Mandla, maybe you could try MJS (http://mjs.sourceforge.net/). You mentioned it last Decmember at http://kmandla.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/audio-players-for-the-console/.

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:06:43 +0000

The only problem with this route is that the hardware would probably be incompatible. I would need a PCMCIA USB card since the machine doesn’t have native USB ports, and on top of that, the card would have to predate CardBus because again, the system can’t understand the later PCMCIA style. And then on top of that it would have to have enough resources left to handle the sound card. I don’t know if all of that is possible.

But finding an old pre-CardBus USB connector would make my life infinitely easier. … Hmm. …

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:03:09 +0000

Thanks for those ideas. I’ll see what I can come up with. I know early Debian versions are very snappy on this; the only tradeoff in the past has been that I seem to suffer for some of the software I enjoy in recent versions. I shall try to keep an open mind though. …

By: Costin Stroie

Costin Stroie — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 13:55:42 +0000

There is life at 166Mhz, you just need to look at the right place. In fact, there are two such places. If you need to use linux on that machine, try to use the 2.4 kernel version and OSS, not ALSA. Moreover, mpg123 with mmx-optimized decoder or even mplayer with mpg123 backend are much faster than madplay or libmad-based players. It is incredible how on the same machine, a Toshiba Tecra 530 CDT, using linux 2.6, ALSA and madplay, the CPU usage is over 60% while using linux 2.4, OSS and mplayer the CPU is at 2% (two percent). On this machine, Debian 3.1 Sarge performs better than Etch or Lenny. The other solution is to step back a little more, while still in open source, and use FreeDOS with mpxplay. You could create a minimal floppy image, boot it with memdisk (from the syslinux project) and let it play for you. Look at the System Requirements on the Wikipedia page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpxplay

By: zoobab

zoobab — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:13:26 +0000

You can use madplay, it consumes less CPU then other players, due to its integer instead of floating point code.

By: Ian

Ian — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:35:04 +0000

Random thought – do the lightweight music players use libvorbisidec/tremor (integer arithmetic only) to decode vorbis files or are they using libvorbis (with floating point arithmetic)?

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 23:06:47 +0000

Thanks for these notes; it might be that I have been going about this in the wrong way. Thus far my strategy has been to lighten the load across the board in an effort to preserve enough system resources to handle “standard” ogg format music files at a “standard” level of playback.

I’ll see if I can downsample the output or go to mono, or even try an out-of-date codec, and see what results I get. Science demands and answer. Cheers, all.

By: Duncan Snowden

Duncan Snowden — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:06:25 +0000

Well, I know that my old 50MHz Amiga could only play MP3s in mono at 22KHz, and only then if it was doing absolutely nothing else.

Motorola’s 50MHz is about 100MHz in Intel money because 68ks do more in one cycle than x86s (Apple used to put double-speed xtals in Macs so they could compete on the numbers; I may have mentioned this before), and the ’030 was roughly comparable with the 486SX, in that it was released the same year and had no FPU, which obviously helps with this sort of thing, hence why dj and yasen could do the same on a 66 (ie, “33″) MHz DX unit.

So I’d expect you to do a little better than that on a 150MHz Pentium, but it depends what else is going on. I agree with yasen, though: try mono if you can. It won’t make a lot of difference anyway with laptop speakers.