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

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

terryolsen@aol.com (TerryOlsen) wrote:

>Has anyone ever came up with a program and/or drivers for using CDR burners on
>the GS?  What about an MP3 player???

The IIGS should have no trouble using CDR burners with the
Apple High Speed SCSI card PROVIDING DRIVERS ARE
WRITTEN.  That's the key.  The HS SCSI card has a full
SCSI implementation.  You can even write a driver for the
popular SCSI Ethernet transcievers if you want.

In case you are wondering, the IIGS with the Apple High
Speed SCSI card is more than fast enough for 1:1
interleave on my IBM 1GB SCSI hard drive, let alone a
1x (or even 2x) CDR drive!

The RamFAST is a different story.  The RF card's SCSI
implementation is hackerish.  It has already been shown
that even with a theoretical driver, the Ethernet devices
won't work with it.  CDR may or may not work.

As for the MP3 player, well it is not feasable given the
current state of the IIGS CPU to decompress and play
an MP3 song on the fly.  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.

Playing a big stereo sample is not a problem for the IIGS.
See this link:

ftp://ground.ecn.uiowa.edu/apple2/apple16/Music/Songs/

and download this archive:

becausexmas.shk

It contains (from what I can tell from the documentation)
a sample 6-7MB in size with a sampling rate of 26Khz.
The player is called Oversampler and is capable of
stereo, although the sample in the above archive
happens to be mono.  Using my Apple IIGS with
my IBM 1GB SCSI drive (fast seek/access time) I
can set the oversampling feature to 4x in a shift-boot.
That means each "pixel" of the sample is quadrupled
and the sample is played at 4x the original sampling
rate.  The resulting waveform that the Ensoniq chip
actually plays is 104Khz!  As far as I can tell,
maximum sampling rate seems to be determined
by the speed of the hard drive/controller combo.
You also don't need lots of memory to play large
samples.  Here's why: it plays the each byte of
the sample as it is read off the hard drive.  Thus,
it does not load much of the actual file at any
particular time into memory.

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.

Thus, if a converter can be written that converts
the MP3 into a standard IIGS digitized sample
format (the converting takes a long time, but
hey they said the same about JPEG graphics
and there are JPEG converters for the IIGS now)
of 8-bit 44Khz stereo, Oversampler can play
it....with 2x oversampling to boot (that is, at
88Khz)!