Flac player for USB devices

All being well, we’re close to having USB Audio working on more RO machines. It enables the user to both play and record audio with high quality, including 24bit, and means we don’t have to depend on mainboard audio hardware.

The snag is that as yet the only players and recorders are ‘demo’ ones written by myself and a couple of other people. These have various limits. e.g. only play/record LPCM Wave files. It would help a lot if we had a WIMP/desktop player application that could play sequences of Wave and Flac files with a friendly user interface.

However I’m clueless about writing such desktop programs.

So, anyone interested in doing this or helping it along?

I and others have already done working demos of how to use the actual USB Audio.

Anyone interested?

Jim

Direct support under RISC OS would be cool. But an integration with DiskSample will be enough for playing sound with DigitalCD.
http://www.riscos-digitalcd.net/digitalcd/modules/disksample.htm

Good point is that SampleEd could be use too for playing sound. And of course it will be able to load Wave files.
http://www.reallysmall.co.uk/Pages/normal/software/sound/sampleed/sampleed.html

The problem with modifying DiskSample is that it then would limit to 16bit. The only way around that would be to fully make it and DigitalCD 24bit capable. That would be fine with me, but will it happen unless the ROSS is also made 24bit? The point here is that DiskSample is a ‘driver’ to feed SoundDMA. So as things stand it only ever has to output 16bit. But for USB you may need to send, say, 32 bits to play even 16bit files with an Audio Class 2 USB DAC. So it would need to do part of what the HAL does for the main ROSS. At present it just passes that on to SoundDMA and the HAL.

I don’t know anything about SampleEd, but it looks like it uses DigitalRender, which I suspect is also currently no more than 16bit. So might face the same problem.

I can try asking Chris Martin about DigitalRender → 24bit. But I don’t know who to ask about DiskSample.

FWIW You can play flac files by piping the output from the flac tool into the DeviceFS-like interface which Colin produced. But that’s hardly a desktop player in the sense I was asking about.

Jim

FWIW You can play flac files by piping the output from the flac tool into the DeviceFS-like interface which Colin produced. But that’s hardly a desktop player in the sense I was asking about.

OK, so a front-end for this could do the job… at start.

At present the ‘pipe’ approach tends to run in a TaskWindow IIRC. A front end that showed details and gave some simple user controls would help I suspect.

I can’t recall if the DeviceFS-like interface of Colin’s approach is already published somewhere. I should check /ask him.

TBH if nothing else, having a few people working on various aspects of making USB Audio more user-friendly would at least help convince others that the area is one people are wanting and would be interested in using.

Jim