Its about time that souncards came out with mp3 hardware decoders built in, gez I'm sick of my computer momentarily locking up sometimes when I'm usin

[DABANSHEE]

It'd be a neat feature, aye. Winamp, Sonique & WMP do seem to hog resourses. Which can a negative influence if one is also using resourse hogging software in the foreground.

I know my computer doesnt like me using 3DMax, while I have mp3 music playing in the background.

 

[Cknyc]

I have a dual processor machine and can encode 2 mp3's at once or play a game while encoding.

 

[divinemartyr]

You know that's an interesting point. I'm surprised no one has decided to include this as a totally separate chip. An onboard decoding chip. You should work for a company's R&D team that develops sound cards, this would be the next big breakthrough.

divinemartyr

 

[seewhy]

Another vote for dual cpu!!! Even my dual celeron @550 have not problem decoding mp3/divx while doing other stuff.

 

[Muerto]

That's the longest title I've ever seen.

But yeah, that would be a cool feature. Not very many of us can afford dual processor systems so an onboard decoder would kick @ss.

 

[glen]

Well, since Nvidia is getting into the sound card buisness, and they may soon have bin after bin of VSA-100 chips, maybe they can reverse engineer then to decode....nm.

 

[Degenerate]

Very good idea!!! since mp3 are soo popular.

i agreeeeeeee....

 

[AdamK47]

The title is longer than the actual post.

 

[Wingznut]

The Santa Cruz does hardware MP3 decoding.

Ripped from www.turtlebeach.com: "DSP also offloads MP3 playback and other audio tasks from your PC?s processor, and accelerates decoding of MP3 compressed audio files, while they play ? no more slowdowns!"

 

[kami]

How exactly does the Santa Cruz do that? I mean, there's no explanation. Does it work with any software and the sound card just magically detects when an mp3 is playing and processes it instead of letting the CPU process it?

 

[Diesel21]

I can do whatever I want while listening to MP3's. Play online counter-strike, burn cd-r and so on. If you start up winamp and play a mp3 and press ctrl-shift-escape and clicks performance my system uses between 1 and 2 percent cpu usage to play a mp3.

Just don't see the need for decoder in hardware.

 

[Erasmus-X]

The only way I could imagine the Santa Cruz doing hardware MP3 deconding of any kind is by doing a hardware-assisted acceleration, like ATI's DVD decoding. Of course, it probably only takes effect when you use the proprietary software used with the card. Just a thought.....

MP3 decoding would be nice though. I think a lot of manufacturers are ignoring it right now, seeing that most mainstream users have 600MHz+ machines that have no problem with MP3 decoding under normal situations.

 

[DABANSHEE]

Yes, I just looked up the Sharky extreme reveiw & using a 1ghz PIII there was buggerall difference as far as CPU utilisation whether mp3 hardware decoding was enabled all not. But when the same system was underclocked down to 266mhz, the difference was remarkable, with a CPU utilisation of 12% when hardware assist was disabled & a CPU usage rate of just 0.05% when the mp3 hardware asist feature was enabled.

"MP3 decoding would be nice though. I think a lot of manufacturers are ignoring it right now, seeing that most mainstream users have 600MHz+ machines that have no problem with MP3 decoding under normal situations."

Don't you mean most people are currently buying 600+mhz systems (even then I'm sure not so sure its true), as the vast majority of people out there have relative old computers, especially once you get ouside of the IT scene.

 

[xtreme2k]

I dont see why we need MP3 hardware decoder when a P3/800 can do it using the WinAMP 2.22 decoder (best quality) using less than 2% of the CPU.

 

[beat mania]

Because some software would want 100% CPU load and it'll fight with the mp3 software for that '2%', thus making the mp3 skip. Simple as that. No matter how fast your CPU is, you'll always have that problem.

 

[xtreme2k]

There is NO SOFTWARE that demand 100% cpu loading as far as I know. The CPU time is always given by the OS, not taken by the program itself. EVEN If there is such a program that demand 100% cpu, even a DEDICATED HARDWARE decoder will screw up since there is no controller that actually uses 0% cpu, there is always some CPU footprint.

 

[Sunner]

WinAmp hovers between 0 and 1 percent CPU usage while Im playing.
Using version 2.71 with the stands decoder.

 

[beat mania]

low level processes are protected, no? else, I guess the decoder isn't going to help huh?

I thought that if the program has highest priority, then it can take the cpu cycles from lower priority programs? Anyway, I have this newsreader that'll kill every single program when it tries to read in some 10k+ message newsgroup, that's where I came up with that idea.

 

[xtreme2k]

as far as I know, MOST program runs at normal priority except most CDburning Programs which uses HIGHER. I dont think 3dStudio has any 'low level' stuffs anyway. The low level stuff that runs at critical priority are the kernels usually. Anyway, Winamp and the like uses SO LITTLE resources on a modern processor that basically it can be disregarded. If it is really pissing you off if audio is skipping, push up the Winamp priority from normal to higher will usually solve it. There is no need for dedicated hardware.

 

[Rellik]

Xtreme, about that 100 percent workload: EVER TRIED SETI@HOME ?

It has 100 percent workload.

 

[xtreme2k]

--

 

[xtreme2k]

I am talking about no software DEMANDING 100% work load,
seti does not DEMAND, it make USES of the free processing.

if a program DEMAND 100% cpu, that means the cpu will do NOTHING ELSE but run that program. Seti is a program that will MAKE USE of the free processing, but does not demand 100%. If it DEMAND 100%, it means NOTHING ElSE will run when seti is running, which is NOT the case.

 

[Eug]

I don't see much point in a hardware MP3 decoder on a PC at the moment. The few times I'd want no CPU usage by other programs (like when I'm playing games) I'd turn off MP3 anyway.

With anyone with a PIII/Celemine/Athlon/Duron should have absolutely no problems since on a reasonably fast CPU the CPU usage by MP3 decoding is almost negligible. If you are having problems, either the CPU is too slow or there are some software/driver incompatibilities or something.

My rare problem is just the opposite. Rarely I can get a split second pause in MP3 playback if I've got too many things accessing the hard drive at the same time. But I've got a hardware MP3 solution (Apex 600A) that solves that problem.

 

[Galadala]

Yes, I feel that hardware MP3 Decoding is not neccessary, that would only be needed if you possesed a really old system and as such these are being phased out so in a year or so everyone will have at least a 500 Mhz CPu or there abouts. Once you upgrade your system to above a 500 MP3's are not a problem whilst playing games. Its all a matter of how well your sound card can handle more than one Sound channel at the samw time.

Mine can do 32!

 

[AtriumBruin]

one word: marketing!

i believe dvd playback at this point looks pretty good on any new video card, but people buy ATI's because it has hardware dvd decoding.