native RISC OS support for MP3 / WAV / FLAC

It would be nice to add support to RISC OS’s sound system to include MP3 playback. Not only streaming but from memory too. Also support for WAV and FLAC too.

Excellent idea, and not a little overdue?

Being able to decompress entire MP3/FLAC (and how about OGG?) to an arbitrary buffer for minimal CPU usage during playback would be especially appreciated by RISC OS users interested in making games.

David.
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Doesn’t the AMPlayer module cover MP3?

AMPlayer v.1.39 plays MP3s here (System details: RasPi B @ 900MHz, RO 5.21 [RC12, 12-Jan-15]).

I play FLAC files using DigitalCD no problem.

I just thought it would be nice to have a set of simple consistent SWIs to attach an MP3 to a RISC OS sound channel and then set its stereo position and play it etc. Since MP3, WAV, FLAC and OGG are quite common formats it makes sense to have these supported natively.

A standardised API for sound in/out would be useful. Back in the day, I wondered if Replay would address the ‘out’, since it was a flexible architecture with pluggable codecs. But I don’t believe it’s part of the ‘opened up’ RISC OS 5.

Nothing too wrong with individual applications distributing/RMEnsuring AMPlayer (or whatever). Business as usual for RISC OS, isn’t it?

I think it would be great to take all the complexities out of being able to attach samples to channels and just play them. For me producing sound from within my programs is the most difficult part

As mentioned on the ‘New Game Development’ thread, I’m developing a module for sound synthesis and sample playback. I’ve written the DSP code and tested within a command line program.

I’ve have put this on hold until I’ve released Overlord.

It is planned (if everything works) to include the following:

• 8 channels
• Modulatable sample playback
• A 2 pole resonant low pass filter (IIR using fixed point) per voice,
• Oscillators that support 1 or more of the following waveforms mixed together : Saw, Triangle, Modulatable pulse waves, Modulatable noise
• A single effects bus that offers:
  – Chorus effect
  – Delay effect (i.e. echo)
  – Overdrive (i.e. distortion)
  – Warmth (i.e. a custom effect I designed to warm the sound up a bit based on very short delay lines)
• Envelopes
• XOR of adjacent sound channels.

So its sort of a cross between the Commodore 64 SID, the Amiga and the BBC micro sound chips.

Different SWIs would be provided with simple operations seperated from more flexible envelope operations.

What I have to do to finish this is:

• Test the code
• Wrap into a module that uses shared sound

So the SWIs & *commands would offer something like:
– synthload sample
– synthplay sample pitch volume
– synth channel flags volume-or-envelope wave-or-sample filter-cutoff resonance pitch duration

I hope to finish this over the coming months.

As mentioned on the ‘New Game Development’ thread, I’m developing a module for sound synthesis and sample playback. I’ve written the DSP code and tested within a command line program. So its sort of a cross between the Commodore 64 SID, the Amiga and the BBC micro sound chips.

Sounds cool. I still love listening to SID and Chip music so this is right up my alley.
Will there be a GUI to create tunes with this as well. Then we could have something similar to the V2 Synthesis routines by Farbrausch (http://1337haxorz.de/products.html) working with RISC OS.

Hi Alan,

In the longer term I will add a GUI (possibly later this year), however I plan to proritise completion of the module first. Others could then add front ends, or drive it via MIDI or BASIC programs as well.

Regards,

Tony

Hi Alan,

I will be looking at this again soon. I was wondering, would a tracker interface be ok? This would be quicker to develop (I believe…) and it would be nice to have a native RISC OS tracker that has a low CPU footprint.

Tony