I just tried a 64kbit mono on a 486-100, worked alright but skipped when I tried to stop or close winamp. I know for sure a 128 stereo will work on a pentium 133, I just don't have anything between the two to test on, unless I underclocked the pentium.
I remember using Xing software with a 486/66, but that was when mp3 was still fairly unknown and I don't remember the quality.
The key was the software: some decoders were more optimized and worked better on low end machines.
I have traveled across the universe and through the years to find Her.
Sometimes going all the way is just a start...
486 100 MHz is enough for playing mp3 in 44100 Hz mono or in 22050 Hz stereo.
I think the bitrate is less relevant.
Earlier versions of Winamp had options to downsample mp3 playback and discard stereo signal.
Same for Open Cubic Player.
There is already a topic about this very question buried in this place...
My experience using a Cyrix 5x86 100MHz
Windows 95 with any MP3 player: 128kB Stereo MP3s need downsampling or quality reduction to play reliably.
MPXplay in pure DOS: Can play 128kB Stereo MP3s without problems, 160kB too.
--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul
i tried on a cyrix 100 too back in the day - it was semi fluent under windows for me, it was important to get rid of _all_ unnecessary load to get it to play (128 kbit); mono certainly is one of those things that help; never tried with DOS before, but when i was still learning to program i did a comparison of available cpu time in win/dos - it was rather huge(was on win 95a - diskette edition upgrade from 3.1 😁 );
you could go flac too;
anyway why do you need this info?
if gus somewhat accelerated mod, maybe there was a card that accelerated mp3?
WinPlay3 *runs* on a 486DX33 or higher machine with Windows 3.1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinPlay3
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
//My video channel//
There is DOS program that could play .MP3 using internal pc speaker: http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm (look for "MP3PC")
But the program seems to dislike ID3v2 tag and refuses to play mp3 that have it, so you may need to remove them,
and seems to be limited to available RAM, so it can't play large mp3 file.
Requires dos4gw.
-fffuuu
wrote:if gus somewhat accelerated mod, maybe there was a card that accelerated mp3?
Yes, see MP3 hardware decoding ISA cards . Additionally, the Commodore folks recently (re-)made an MP3 module.
"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
//My video channel//
wrote:There is already a topic about this very question buried in this place... […]
There is already a topic about this very question buried in this place...
My experience using a Cyrix 5x86 100MHz
Windows 95 with any MP3 player: 128kB Stereo MP3s need downsampling or quality reduction to play reliably.
MPXplay in pure DOS: Can play 128kB Stereo MP3s without problems, 160kB too.
Here is that topic: Post your 486 Winamp benchmarks. With more precise notes, compared to what I wrote earlier today.
wrote:Yes, see MP3 hardware decoding ISA cards.
Interesting hardware! Though it is annoying that you can probably only use such with the supplied audio players.
--> ISA Soundcard Overview // Doom MBF 2.04 // SetMul
There's also a very good player for DOS - DSS - http://old-dos.ru/index.php?page=files&mode=f … &do=show&id=438
It's kind of amazing how much faster a Pentium II is.
My DX2-80 can only handle 64kb/s 22KHz stereo MP3s using Winamp under Win95B.
A PII-266 can play 320K MP3s at 2% CPU usage, using foobar2000 on Win2000 SP4.
"A little sign-in here, a touch of WiFi there..."
wrote:It's kind of amazing how much faster a Pentium II is.
it's faster also due to special multimedia extensions: MMX
