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

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

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.

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

>>>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!

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.

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!

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 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)!