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

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

Charles Stephens <devnull@dobbs.eng.sun.com> wrote:

>TerryOlsen  <terryolsen@aol.comRemoveMe> writes:
>
> TO> Has anyone ever came up with a program and/or drivers for using
> TO> CDR burners on the GS?  What about an MP3 player???
>
>I suspect that even the GS is too slow to keep the CD-R's FIFO full.
>If you don't do that there will be a gap in the CD-R and thus ruin any
>CD-R burn.

The IIGS is fast enough with the Apple High Speed SCSI
card that it can keep a 1:1 interleave on my IBM 1GB SCSI
hard drive.  I think it would have no problem with a 1x or
maybe 2x CD-R if a driver were written.

>I know of no MP3 player.  MP3's are also a bit CPU and I/O intensive
>and would probably have to be converted to some other format before
>playback.

Yup, my thoughts exactly.

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 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 their 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)!