Re: CDR's & MP3 for GS???

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer) writes...

>spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote:
>
>>terryolsen@aol.comRemoveMe (TerryOlsen) writes...
>>
>>>Has anyone ever came up with a program and/or drivers for using
>>>CDR burners on the GS?
>>
>>    To the best of my knowledge, no software drivers exist to
>>support this. Another issue is despite there being SCSI CD-R
>>drives, I'm not so sure about the feasibility of the Apple HS
>>SCSI or RamFAST SCSI (or the IIgs itself) being able to support
>>them on the hardware level.
>
>The RamFAST may not be able to support it given its
>hackerish implementation of SCSI, but I'm almost
>positive the Apple HS SCSI card WILL support it if
>a driver were written.

    Compatibility with an Apple II SCSI controller is only one
issue to consider. Someone else brought up the possibility that
the Apple IIgs itself may not be fast enough to deal with the
writing (burning) process.

>The Apple card's implementation is standard.  The
>ONLY thing keeping it from working with a CDR
>is a driver.

    The only definite thing is getting it working for *reading*
CD media, writing is another thing.

    Even if you could support writing, don't you think a 650 MB
permanent storage device is a bit overkill for the IIgs? With a
CD-R your expected to continually create discs packed with 650
megabytes of data. PC and Mac users have no trouble filling this
space because size of audio/video data (QT, AVI, MP3), not too
mention the sheer size of software archives that are often many
hundred megabytes large. In comparison, I can practically fit
the *entire* Caltech Apple II FTP archive onto a single CD-ROM.

>>>>What about an MP3 player???
>>>
>>>    That is completely out of the question. An MPEG1, Layer 3
>>
>>    So a player is out of the question, but (at least in theory)
>>an MP3->WAV convertor could be written.
>(big snip)
>>    Now we can listen to the audio, right? Wrong. Even though
>>you would now have an 8-bit, 44 kHz, stereo audio file, it
>>would be several megabytes large, so you would need a program
>>that could spool the file in and out of memory as it played
>>(most GS players want to load the entire waveform into memory
>>before playing it, and 4-8 MB would not be enough). I believe
>>there is a program called "LongPlay" which does do spooling,
>>but can it support stereo audio? If not, you'd need to convert
>>it once again, from stereo->monorail.
>
>WRONG!

    You must really enjoy embarassing yourself, read below.

>Why is it that the author asks a simple question and you
>rub your palms together in joy as you swoop down and
>editorilize about how bad the IIGS is.

    Why is it you are so personally wounded if I state technical
facts about a *computer* that hightlight its weak spots. Did you
ever stop and think that by facing the fact there is a weakness
in hardware or software, it might motivate someone to think of a
way of getting around that limitation? If there is a hole in the
road, what is the best thing to do? Pretend it doesn't exist and
tell people the road is fine, or announce it is there so others
know about it and maybe do something to fix it?

    Also, why is it your the only person who attacks nearly every
comment, statement or answer I post to comp.sys.apple2? Am I the
villian you paint me to be, or are you just looking for someone
new to pick fights with ever since Nathan left? Whether you post
under the name "Supertimer", "Anonymous" or "Scott G.", you have
always felt it necessary to jump down my throat.

>Oversampler can do stereo, play the sample as it is
>loaded from disk (eliminating your memory problem
>since the sample is being spooled) and can play (off
>my fast 1GB IBM SCSI hard drive) at a sampling rate
>of 104Khz!

    May I borrow your capitalized "WRONG!" from from above? It
is more applicable here than above. :)

    Oversampler does have the output options "Stereo", "Left",
"Right", "Internal", however that is referring to how you want
a MONORAIL waveform played. Do you want it doubled to both the
left/right speakers, the right speaker only, left speaker only
or disable the stereo card output completely (use the internal
speaker or headphone jack instead).

    If I download a true 8-bit stereo waveform (the left and
right channel are actually different) Oversampler will treat
it as a monorail waveform, or from my experience, get rather
confused and play only one of the two channels using the wrong
frequency. To the best of my knowledge, there are currently
no programs for the IIgs that can directly playback stereo
*.WAV files (the Audio Animator software only works with its
own unique stereo format, and rSounder allows you to load in
and play both channels combined or ONE channel at a time).

>Theoretically, it would be possible
>to write a program that will first translate MP3 into
>standard IIGS digital sample and play it back, however,
>it would take a LONG time.  You would basically turn
>on the IIGS at night, run the program, and wake up
>in the morning to retrieve your converted sample.

[lots snipped]

    Isn't that the same thing I just said in my previous post?

>Replacing the mono sample in the above archive
>with an 8-bit 44Khz stereo sample I take directly
>from a Windows PC or Macintosh, I can get 2x
>oversampling with Oversampler using a shift-boot.
>It sounds great!  You should try it.

    Perphaps you should as well. Oversampler does not support
stereo *.WAV files, attempting to load one in will get you a
distorted piece of audio that is being played back at about
half the frequency it should (increasing the playback speed
won't make it stereo either). The author of Oversampler is
the same person who wrote Hermes/Shadowrite and I believe
still part of F.E. Systems who's members still frequent this
newsgroup. You if think I'm wrong, ask the author directly.

    The only program that even *recognizes* it's dealing with
stereo *.WAV files is rSounder, which brings up a message box
asking if you want to combine both channels or independently
load the left or right channel.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca