On: Efficient music players remain elusive

[amelius]

> most think they how to write efficient software when they need to, but very few can

Doesn't mp3 transcoding have dedicated hardware instructions, making the job much easier?

[pjc50 → amelius]

It's not really "dedicated", it's just SIMD for FFT like most signal processing. Takes about 25 MIPS: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2672/why-...

You can get dedicated MP3 low-power decoder chips. You might have one in a fancy PC soundcard (SBLive?), but I don't think it's included in baseline AC97.

(I remember having a 486DX that could decode MP3s with the Fraunhofer player at about 95% CPU but not Winamp, which was slighly too slow to keep up)

[amelius → pjc50]

Does this also hold for modern smartphones?

[pjc50 → amelius]

I don't know exactly; the chipsets tend to be closed. I've seen baseband processors which have the AMR codec in hardware (adaptive multi-rate, used for GSM phone audio).

[jleahy → amelius]

No, because it's so easy to begin with.

[amelius → jleahy]

Satisfying a low-power constraint?