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Date:      Fri, 11 Dec 1998 11:58:15 +0100 (CET)
From:      Oliver Fromme <olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de>
To:        freebsd-hardware@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: sane sound cards?
Message-ID:  <199812111058.LAA02411@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de>

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Richard Foulk wrote in list.freebsd-hardware: you wrote (11 Dec 1998 01:52:16 +0100):
 > I've recently become interested in the mp3 audio stuff and the capability
 > of playing CD quality music with my system.
 > [...]
 > I've recently been using a SoundBlaster AWE 64 Gold, with a 200Mhz
 > MMX Pentium running 3.0-RELEASE.  It works fine while lightly loaded.
 > But will start dropping audio data as the load climbs a bit.  A second
 > or two of on-board buffering should fix the problem completely, and make
 > it possible to play mp3s on slower systems.

I'm using a Pentium-75 with an AWE64-Value for playing MPEG
audio files, it works great.  You should use an mp3 player
which supports buffering of decoded audio data.  For example,
mpg123 (http://mpg.123.org/) has an option to specify the
buffer size.  I usually use 2 Mb (that's about 6 seconds of
CD quality audio).

As far as I know, there are no soundcards with large audio
buffers (the on-board RAM of soundcards is usually used for
sample banks and similar things).  It wouldn't make much
sense anyway, because the soundcard reads its data via DMA
from main memory, so the computer's main memory can be used
as buffer in a much more flexible way by the audio driver
and application software (like mpg123).

Regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, Leibnizstr. 18/61, 38678 Clausthal, Germany
(Info: finger userinfo:olli@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de)

"In jedem Stück Kohle wartet ein Diamant auf seine Geburt"
                                         (Terry Pratchett)

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