Christan.. 

If you have money.. http://www.digigram.com

PCX22v2 is the PCI version.. They might have some old ISA slot ones.. 

They have sound cards that will do the mp3/mp2, decoding/encoding right on
board.

Most players though won't utilized the hardware though.. And playout though
directsound.. Might have to write code or use their players.

Used this for a playout app, and the cards work great.

Brady

-----Original Message-----
From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu] On Behalf Of
CSB
Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 1:29 PM
To: piclist@mit.edu
Subject: [PIC] ISA-based mp3 decoder (fwd)

Ooops! forgot the tag.

Hi All,

  I have an old(er) computer, that has trouble playing mp3 files and doing
other stuff at the same time (especially games, etc.) I tried various
players, but they all use 10-20% CPU power. That is a lot. So, I had the
idea of having a hardware decoder inside the PC, that would do all the work.

Luckily, I have unused ISA slots on my motherboard. Plus, I have a free
stereo sound input on my soundcard!

So, I thought I might put an mp3 decoder chip, some RAM (probably DRAM,
since it's so cheap, and I have a few MB lying around here and there), and
some programmable logic to be the glue between the bus, the decoder and the
memory bank. Then, I would have a small piece of software that would
retrieve chunks of mp3 files, buffer them on the decoder card, and control
things such as play, pause, next, prev., etc.

However, this would involve quite a lot of work. I tried to find similar
projects on the net, but I have found none. I did find hundreds of 'first
ever portable mp3 player!!!', but they are all based on memory devices or
IDE drives. That is not what I am looking for. Surprisingly, even the
PICLIST archive turned up nothing.

Has anyone heard of such a thing?


Christian
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