This thread is not only dead since 8 years, it's also about playing MP3s, not WAV files. So what's the point?

null

Actually, I can play 128k MP3 @ 22KHz mono.
I have seen 486 that can play flac/wav without any problem due to the less/no compression:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zm5s_Le7TV4

What are these mp3’s You speak of?
I played mp2’s on my IBM Eduquest 386slc 25mhz

derSammler wrote:

This thread is not only dead since 8 years

Not any more - split the new posts and locked the old one, while inserting a link to the old thread in the first post in this one.

Eight years is a hell of a bump - don't do that, RiP.

Even a 286 or 386 should have no issue playing 44kHz WAVs if it can read them from disk & DMA them to the sound card fast enough. Playing a WAV file is not CPU intensive if you have DMA.

It's when you get into mixing or resampling that it starts bogging down the CPU, and if you're using something like Media Player in Windows 9x, it's doing that. Try from the DOS command line - it should be no sweat.

xjas wrote:

Even a 286 or 386 should have no issue playing 44kHz WAVs if it can read them from disk & DMA them to the sound card fast enough. Playing a WAV file is not CPU intensive if you have DMA.

Actually, even an 8088@4.77 MHz should be good enough for that.
I think I saw somebody up to playing CD-quality sound on such a CPU, probably by writing some special software, but I don't know if he actually accomplished that feat, can't find that thread now...

The lowest processor you can go to play some really good quality MP3's in mono and downsampled is a 486/66 in my case

I had hard time playing WAVs on a PC104 module based on AMD Elan520 (133MHz 5x86), and simply because it only had PIO HDD access. Playing over built in PCI 100Mbit network was fine though. MP3s weren't a problem on that board though sometimes there was stutter here or there when doing other things.

Anyway, the lowest CPU capable of playing MP3 files is 386+FPU, only plays low bitrates, of course...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Jj97NXgHw4

Rodoko wrote:

The lowest processor you can go to play some really good quality MP3's in mono and downsampled is a 486/66 in my case

I used winamp2x for that, but there is perhaps a dos-mp3 player that's better for that.

xjas wrote:

Even a 286 or 386 should have no issue playing 44kHz WAVs if it can read them from disk & DMA them to the sound card fast enough.
Playing a WAV file is not CPU intensive if you have DMA.

I can confirm that. I played songs in WAVE format (Stereo ~22KHz) off CD-ROMs back in the days. On a 286-12 based PC running Windows 3.10 in Standard Mode with a PAS16 sound card.
Without SmartDrive, btw. 😉

I once played an MP3 (I forget the bitrate) on a Macintosh Performa 5200CD with a PowerPC 603 CPU @ 75MHz.

I don't recall what software I used, but it would play ok albeit you literally couldn't do anything else until it stopped playing, the whole system was frozen including the mouse.

Fun, but not very practical. 🤣

Something like P120, P133, K5 PR133 will play mp3s without hassle. I'm pretty sure back in the 90s when mp3 craze begun my friend was playing them on his Am486DX4 100Mhz although I think he recompressed some of the higher fidelity ones to basic 128kbps joint-stereo, but I think it was mostly due to storage space concerns.

I played MP3s on a Toshiba T2450CT - 486DX4-75, 16MB RAM with Winamp 2.xx on a 98lited Win98 install. 128kbps was the maximum and even then I think I had to use a downsampling option that was available in the settings menu. I also used Cubic Player for DOS, but I can't remember if that could play without downsampling - I mainly used it for MOD files.

dosamp on my 486 back in the day. worked fine. l3enc, l3dec and dosamp...

you can also hookup a mp3 decoding module on the lpt port, so you can play with any cpu that can stream the data to lpt.

When I had a 486 DX2 it would stutter on most mp3s

matze79 wrote:

you can also hookup a mp3 decoding module on the lpt port, so you can play with any cpu that can stream the data to lpt.

There were also some internal sound cards with hardware MP3 decoding, but they never got popular, at least not in the PC, though I reckon they were somewhat more successful in the Amiga world.