TI-H: Music Player
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TI-H: Music Player
I'm sure few of you remember me, as I haven't been on this lits in months.
But to the point:
I'm sure many of you have heard of MPMan, the portable MP3 player, which
functions similar to a walkman, only with MP3's on a flash chip instead of a
tape or CD. Well, I'm a tracker, and I write computer music. There's an
extensive scene for us trackers, and we've begun to think about making a
"MOD-Man" of sorts, tentatively titled MOD to GO. This post is primarily
aimed toward Grant and those like him, as he's already come up with his own
MP3 player (if I remember right, that is), and he'd be a great resource if
he'd lend his assistance. Any of you who would like to help out would
definitely be welcome to, as us trackers are primarily musicians, with a few
coders, and almost no hardware-knowledgeable people. I've got several ideas,
but I need input from people who've worked in this field before.
I guess the first area of concern is the processor. I've looked into a few,
but I really don't know what I'm going to need for this project. It wouldn't
require as much processing power as an MP3 player, as tracked modules (MOD's)
were being tracked and played long before MPEG was a household name (though
obviously the better the processor the better). It would have to be at least
16-bit, since most trackers use 16-bit samples. Processing speed is a very
tough area to cover. I don't know how many publicly available processors can
run at over 200MHz. I'm running a P5-200 PC w/ 64M RAM, and there are modules
that my computer isn't even capable of handling. It locks up and I have to
reboot to fix it. There are roughly 30 different file formats that would have
to be supported, most of them not requiring that much power, but some do.
Also, RAM is a very important issue. This system would also be used as a
tracker (music-editing software), so it'd have to have enough RAM to contain
an entire track to be edited quickly and easily. And with this, I mean some
tracks can be anywhere from 10k to 40M or even more.
As for storage, memory chips would be nice, so that tracks could be saved on
MOD to GO itself, but also I'd like to have a "disk" system. Perhaps even be
able to read IBM-formatted (and maybe Mac too) 3.5" disks and read tracks off
of them to play. The idea has been thrown up to have it double as an audio CD
player, while enabling the user to also read tracks burned as data off of a
data or hybrid CD. I don't know about having an actual hard drive on there,
but that idea has been thrown up as well.
Currently I'm paying preliminary graphics on my TI-85, so 128x64 is the
current size, but I'm thinking 320x200 or even more, since it'll function as a
tracker, most of which normally use a 640x480 PC screen res.
Any questions, comments, suggestions are welcome, please respod! Especially
Grant. If you wish to email me directly, feel free. I don't have a web page
up for it yet, but I'm workin on it. Thanks a bundle!
-Gul
Full Name: Gulopine R Holiture
UT Name: Gulopine
E-mail: gulopine@usa.net
ICQ UIN: 5013953
WWW URL: Vienna 4679, Geocities
Group: IFS
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