Unreleased Amiga Hardware Plays MP3s

May 25, 2025 by Bryan Cockfield 33 Comments

The MP3 file type has been around for so long, and is supported by essentially all modern media software and hardware, that it might be surprising to some to learn that it’s actually a proprietary format. Developed in the late 80s and early 90s, it rose to prominence during the Napster/Limewire era of the early 00s and became the de facto standard for digital music, but not all computers in these eras could play this filetype. This includes the Amigas of the early 90s, with one rare exception: this unreleased successor to the A3000 with a DSP chip, which now also has the software to play back these digital tunes.

The AA3000, developed as a prototype by Commodore, was never released to the general public. Unlike the original A3000 this one would have included a digital signal processing chip from AT&T called the DSP3210 which would have greatly enhanced its audio capabilities. A few prototype boards did make it out into the hands of the public, and the retrocomputing scene has used them to develop replicas of these rare machines. [Wrangler] used one to then develop the software needed for the MPEG layer 2 and 3 decoder using this extra hardware, since the original Amiga 3000 was not powerful enough on its own to play these files back.

If you want to follow along with the community still developing for this platform there’s a form post with some more detail for this specific build (although you may need to translate from German). [Wrangler] additionally points out that there are some limitations with this implementation as well, so you likely won’t get Winamp-level performance with this system, but for the Amiga fans out there it’s an excellent expansion of this computer’s capabilities nonetheless.

Thanks to [Andy] for the tip!

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All-Band Radio Records Signals, Plays MP3s

May 4, 2025 by Tyler August 9 Comments

In these days of everything-streaming, it’s great to see an old school radio build. It’s even better when it’s not old-school at all, but packed full of modern ICs and driven by a micro-controller like the dsPIC in [Minh Danh]’s dsMP3 build. Best of all is when we get enough details that the author needs two blog posts — one for hardware, and one for firmware — like [Minh Danh] has done.

This build does it all: radio, MP3 playback, and records incoming signals. The radio portion of the build is driven by an Si4735, which allows for receiving both in FM and AM — with all the AM bands, SW, MW and LW available. The FM section does support RDS, though because [Minh Danh] ran out of pins on the dsPIC, isn’t the perfect implementation.

The audio section is a good intro to audio engineering if you’ve never done a project like this: he’s using a TDA1308 for headphones, which feeds into a NS8002 to drive some hefty stereo speakers– and he tells you why he selected those chips, as well as providing broken-out schematics for each. Really, we can’t say enough good things about this project’s documentation.

That’s before we get to the firmware, where he tells us how he manages to get the dsPIC to read out MP3s from a USB drive, and write WAVs to it. One very interesting detail is how he used the dsPIC’s ample analog inputs to handle the front panel buttons on this radio: a resistor ladder. It’s a great solution in a project that’s full of them.

Of course we’ve seen radio receivers before, and plenty of MP3 players, too — but this might be the first time we’ve seen an electronic Swiss army knife with all these features, and we’re very glad [Minh Danh] shared it with us.

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Yaydio, A Music Player For Kids

March 29, 2025 by Jenny List 6 Comments

Music consumption has followed a trend over the last decade or more of abandoning physical media for online or streaming alternatives. This can present a problem for young children however, for whom a simpler physical interface may be an easier way to play those tunes. Maintaining a library of CDs is not entirely convenient either, so [JakesMD] has created the Yaydio. It’s a music player for kids, that plays music when a card is inserted in its slot.

As you might expect, the cards themselves do not contain the music. Instead they are NFC cards, and the player starts the corresponding album from its SD card when one is detected. The hardware is simple enough, an Arduino Nano with modules for MP3 playback, NFC reading, seven segment display, and rotary encoder. The whole thing lives in a kid-friendly 3D printed case.

Some thought has been given to easily adding albums and assigning cards to them, making it easy to keep up with the youngster’s tastes. This isn’t the first such kid-friendly music player we’ve seen, but it’s certainly pretty neat.

Freed At Last From Patents, Does Anyone Still Care About MP3?

February 8, 2025 by Maya Posch 99 Comments

The MP3 file format was always encumbered with patents, but as of 2017, the last patent finally expired. Although the format became synonymous with the digital music revolution that started in the late 90s, as an audio compression format there is an argument to be made that it has long since been superseded by better formats and other changes. [Ibrahim Diallo] makes that very argument in a recent blog post. In a world with super fast Internet speeds and the abstracting away of music formats behind streaming services, few people still care about MP3.

The last patents for the MP3 format expired in 2012 in the EU and 2017 in the US, ending many years of incessant legal sniping. For those of us learning of the wonders of MP3 back around ’98 through services like Napster or Limewire, MP3s meant downloading music on 56k dialup in a matter of minutes to hours rather than days to weeks with WAV, and with generally better quality than Microsoft’s WMA format at lower bitrates. When portable media players came onto the scene, they were called ‘MP3 players’, a name that stuck around.

But is MP3 really obsolete and best forgotten in the dustbin of history at this point? Would anyone care if computers dropped support for MP3 tomorrow?

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Linamp, The IRL Winamp

June 6, 2024 by Dan Maloney 60 Comments

Anyone who first experienced music on computers using Winamp probably shares a memory of seeing that classic UI for the first time. Everything about it was a step ahead of the clunky, chunky interfaces we were used to, and even though it was supposed to be unobtrusive, it was hard to tear your eyes off that silky-smooth spectrum analyzer bouncing out your favorite MP3s.

Recapturing a little of the Winamp magic is the goal of Linamp, an physical version of the classic media player. It reproduces the Winamp UI on a touchscreen LCD with a wide aspect ratio that almost perfectly matches the original layout. Behind the display is a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 32 GB SD card, with all the important connections brought out to a board on the back of the case. The case itself is a treat, as it borrows design elements from another bit of retro gear, the mini-rack audio systems that graced many a bookshelf in the 1980s — and powered many high school parties too, if memory serves.

To recreate the case, [Rodmg] designed a sheet metal case and had it custom-made from anodized aluminum by PCBWay. He also printed a bezel for the display that looks very similar to the Winamp window border, complete with control icons. Where the build really shines, though, is with the work [Rodmg] put into the software. He matched the original Winamp UI very closely, both in terms of layout and performance. The pains he went to to get the spectrum analyzer working, including a deep dive into FFT, are impressive.

The results speak for themselves on this one, and hats off to [Rodmg] for the effort and the ride on the nostalgia train. We don’t know if the recent announcement of Winamp’s impending open-sourcing will have much impact on this project, but it might result in a flood of new Winamp builds.

Customizable Bird Clock Sings The Hours By

May 16, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 7 Comments

For those looking to build their own clocks, one of the easiest ways to get started is with a pre-built module that uses a simple quartz oscillator and drives a set of hands. This generally doesn’t allow for much design of the clock besides the face, and since [core weaver] was building a clock that plays bird songs, a much more hackable clock driver was needed to interface with the rest of the electronics needed to build this project.

The clock hands for this build are driven by a double stepper motor which controls an hour and minute hand coaxially but independently. Originally an H-bridge circuit was designed for driving each of the hands but they draw so little current in this configuration that they could be driven by the microcontroller directly. A DS3231 clock is used for timekeeping connected to an ATMega128a which controls everything else. At the start of each hour the clock plays a corresponding bird song by communicating with an mp3 module, and a remote control can also be used to play the songs on demand.

Bird clocks are not an uncommon thing to find off the shelf, but this one adds a number of customizations that let it fly above those offerings, including customizing the sounds that play on the hour and adding remote control capabilities, a lithium battery charging circuit, and a number of other creature comforts. If you’re looking for even more unique bird clock designs this binary bird clock might fit the bill.

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Wozamp Turns Apple II Into Music Player

April 10, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 9 Comments

Besides obvious technological advancements, early computers built by Apple differed in a major way from their modern analogs. Rather than relying on planned obsolescence as a business model, computers like the Apple II were designed to be upgradable and long-term devices users would own for a substantially longer time than an iPhone or Macbook. With the right hardware they can even be used in the modern era as this project demonstrates by turning one into a music player.

The requirements for this build are fairly short; an Apple II with a serial card and a piece of software called surl-server which is a proxy that allows older computers to communicate over modern networks. In this case it handles transcoding and resampling with the help of a Raspberry Pi 3. With that all set up, the media player can play audio files in an FTP network share or an online web radio station. It can also display album art on the Apple II monitor and includes a VU meter that is active during playback.

Although the 11.52 kHz sampling rate and 5-bit DAC may not meet the stringent requirements of audiophile critics, it’s an impressive build for a machine of this era. In fact, the Apple II has a vibrant community still active in the retrocomputing world, with plenty of projects built for it including others related to its unique audio capabilities. And if you don’t have an original Apple II you can always get by with an FPGA instead.