dos mp3 player for a 80286

[DataTrain Elite]

Hey I'm looking for a mp3 player that will work in dos or windows 3.1 with a 286. The ones I’ve found all require a 386 to run on also since there is no sound card in the computer it has to use the internal pc speaker. I’ve found GLX player but it only plays .mod, xm, and s3m and it has a pretty low volume.

[sirpaul484]

It would be pretty hard to find MP3 software for that sort of computer.  It takes a good amount of processing power to play MP3s.  Remember that even the original iPod used a pair of 90 MHz ARM7 CPUs.  Not only that, but also the PC speaker is not really optimized for any sort of audio of that quality, and most software to play even .WAV files using the PC speaker taxes the processor quite a bit.  I used to have software that did that on my 386, and it would grind to a halt when an audio file is played through the PC speaker.

[RedWolf]

I agree with SirPaul that it's probably not computationally possible for a 286 CPU to decode a MP3 file and play it in real time.

Remember that MP3 is special because it uses a compression codec to squish a music file into a smaller size.  When you play an MP3, your computer uncompresses and decodes the data to play back, which takes a significant amount of CPU power by 1980s standards.

If you want to play music on a 286, search for MOD files.  I seem to remember those being traded on BBSes back in the day.  Those were actually composed of representational music data played back through a software synthesizer similar to MIDI files.  They sounded really, really good, though.  I even remember playing one through a PC speaker.

A 286 might also be able to play a WAV file, which is a raw, uncompressed Windows Audio format.  However, the file sizes are rather large.