At 128 kbps, you can fit a bit over an hour of audio into 64 MB. Which isn't great, especially not using a late-90s MP3 encoder, but it's perfectly listenable.
for archival and mastering you'd still use flac.
Vorbis is very good, but managing the audio library, transcoding and transferring to the player are tedious and seem stuck in the 2000s.
Many of us have a large library of MP3s. The gain in quality and space from switching from MP3 V0 to Vorbis Q5 is negligible and does not justify the effort if you are not transcoding from FLAC.
If you're transcoding from FLAC, I think your best bet nowadays is just Opus, really.
The real limiting factor is the maximum size supported by microSD cards. If the player wasn't limited to 64GB, I wouldn't even bother transcoding.
We are at a stage where current solutions are just good enough in most case. Change is therefore becoming increasingly slow.
Even for music streaming, many services continue to use MP3 and AAC.
This whole thing just drowns in jargon and quick technical assertions that are never explained. It is skimming the surface (as though clipped together from various poorly understood sources) rather than explaining things with any depth. The heart of this story is how PC sound worked and how it evolved. Instead you have recitations of speeds and feeds.
It was a speech synthesizer package that (I assume) used the CT1748 mentioned in the article (^F "CT1748") to render very 80s-90s sounding but acceptable speech. You could even precisely control the phoneme generation using a scripting language to make the voices sing songs, with surprisingly tolerable results.
My call to action here is that all the SB16 emulation in PC emulators seems to skip over the CT1748 and/or other necessary parts that makes the speech synthesis possible. Here's Windows 3.1 running in PCem stating "The speech engine cannot be opened. Speech commands cannot be executed." - https://imgur.com/a/bBOihec
So if anyone out there wants a fun project, it would be finalizing the emulation in PCem, 86Box (a PCem fork), DOSBox-X or similar so that this software can run. Essentially it's currently in a state of bitrot and in the process of becoming forgotten.
Also, from the article, the nomad mp3 - now that’s a blast from the past.
Now I have a vague idea of what IRQs and DMA are, but I still have no idea what port 220h was. Don't forget that the Sound Blaster card had a MIDI port to which you could connect a controller or joystick. That was also a nightmare to configure, with calibrations on all axes, button remapping, etc. We were really motivated for pre-teens.
It’s the address (in I/O space, separate from memory space) which the CPU can read/write to communicate with the sound card.
I look back on this fondly. I got some weird brand of soundcard that claimed SB-compatibility but was clearly different. I felt so proud the first time I got sound out of a game and no crashes. The same card was supported very well by Windows 95 a few years later.
https://us.creative.com/kickstarter/
https://www.reddit.com/r/SoundBlasterOfficial/comments/1mpar...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Blaster
Guessing the kickstarter is for some retro thing judging by the image of their old talking parrot on that announcement page.
The first image which looks like some kind of music-making hardware ("instrument") looked a lot like the OP-1 by Teenage Engineering [1]. That would be an interesting partnership, right?
A genuinely down-to-earth person. An engineer’s engineer, somewhat like the Woz. If he had only found his "Steve Jobs", someone who had the vision and marketing savvy, Creative would be have a been major tech player.
Honestly, having the decision between a "U2 Special Edition" and "CEO-signed Special Edition", I would without hesitation (all other things equal) choose the latter one.
A great middle finger to all this musical band fandom, and the hypocrisy of lots of insanely commercially successful musicians who claim that they do this all for the love of music instead of love for money (just to be clear: there exist lots of indie bands for which I immediately do believe their love for music, but these bands are nearly always far too unknown to be suitable for being poster children for selling MP3 players).
No need to mention that I love this kind of marketing. I guess I sometimes have a non-mainstream taste. :-)
It's cool enough for me that Ive kept it.
And it wasn't a total of 10 units, the winner received a collector's package with ALL TEN autographed Creative "Zen Micro" , one in each color available. 2nd~10th place won one "normal" Zen Micro respectively.
Frankly, could be worse. Imagine being a teenager back then and winning 10 MP3 players...
Their initial Sound Blasters made them my default choice in the 90’s, but by late 00’s I vowed to never buy them again, their hardware became overpriced, unreliable and they were user hostile.
It felt like they’ve been coasting from their good reputation in 90’s for a long time now even though they don’t deserve it any more.
My friend in late 90’s got a Sound Blaster live or something. In the early 2000’s you could download driver updates off Creative’s website for their stuff, but if you lost the original driver CD you, you had to find drivers elsewhere.
There was a story of how some guy patched their binary driver to fix a long outstanding bug and at the same time discovered that it was trivial to upgrade the sound card by tweaking the driver and of course Creative got all hostile.
My brother had their WoW headphones and it had a bug where the mic would get progressively softer the longer he was using Ventrillo or Skype and he would have to periodically jump off and back onto the call.
Generic motherboard audio by the mid 90’s was for most purposes as good as Creative stuff, but Creative used patents to artificially keep them from being better, while not making amazing stuff themselves.
When Vista deprecated hardware accelerated audio in Windows and Creative labs moaned about it, I had zero sympathy.
I assume you made a typo and were thinking about mid 00s, as my memory tells me that motherboard audio was really rare thing in mid 90s.
It started to become common after Intel's AC97 standard. (I'd call that more late 90s... That is late 90s, early 00s possibly by the time it started to spread.
So that makes sense.
I'm pretty sure it's a rapid change almost immediately after AC97. In 1998 it's cool if your new PC has built in CD quality audio. In 2000 that's a basic feature like colour graphics, if your PC doesn't then it sucks.
The moment average 16 bit DAC become cheap and games stopped using builtin synths/MIDI it was over, CPUs were fast enough that offloading audio was not a big deal any more and anyone could make good enough one. EAX was fun gimmick but exclusivity probably hurt the idea in the end
If I remember correctly it was a SB Live's drivers that kept on crashing playing Quake 3 on my dual Celeron 533 MHz setup (Abit BP6). Had some mails going back and forth with the Creative support about this specific multi CPU setup and they rejected fixing their drivers because it totally was a niche back then. 18 year old me swore to never buy Creative again and I did so. Today I agree with the support's response but it quite upset me back then.
My counter was that while it’s true that Creative Labs is garbage and so is everyone who works there, that’s doesn’t excuse the fact that Windows’ popularity hinged substantially on a permissive driver model and therefore any crashes of Windows allowed by this decision were equally Microsoft’s responsibility. You don’t get to reap the rewards and disavow the blame for the consequences.
This was really the primary way to get any sort of good sound. And when it came time to upgrade my computer late last year to an AM5 chipset, I realized that my Klipsch 5.1 system wasn't going to cleanly plug into the on-motherboard outputs. You have to split and use your front panel audio out in order to feed the rear channel, which is kludgy and stupid, so off I went again, and found I could still buy a Sound Blaster: this time, the AE-7. It's been pretty reliable, has a little volume knob/input guy for my headset, and the desktop software and drivers aren't as nightmarish as the internet had led me to believe they'd be, even on Windows 11.
It did lead me down this path of wondering how CL was doing nowadays, so it's funny to come across this piece outlining their history in detail and where they are today.
Aureal made the most unbeliveably amazing sound card, which use ray-tracing for sound, in hardware, to produce 3D sound like you are actually there. The sound engine knew the geometry of the space you were in, in your game.
I played the original Half-Life using this, and it was peak gaming.
Its shocking how primitive most game engines are with audio processing. You get linear/inverse square falloff on volume over distance and perhaps reverb in some places and that's about it.
I also had a Vortex2 and it's not about requiring a high-end surround system, as I suspect even today there's still a significant amount of players with decent but not high-end audio. I was playing Quake3 with A3D before they patched it out with either basic stereo speakers or headphones and the placement was superb.
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-tri...
There's only so much you can do with just a left and right speaker and MAYBE a sub.
That said, it does seem like there's new interest in spatial audio, so we'll see. Maybe with some spatial audio headphones, and especially if they add head-tracking so that a sound to your left moves relative to your head (and stationary relative to your body) as you turn your head to face it.
I remember ages ago when it was new, my brother and I were shoveling snow for people to get pocket money to upgrade our PC. We settled on a Turtle Beach Montego II and I adored the thing.
Of course, it was short lived since the update in Windows driver model, and the bankruptcy of Aureal, ended things.
I actually got into retro computing a few years ago and got another Montego II off Ebay cheap and I have to say, the magic is still there.
Frankly, playing something like the original Unreal is my favorite example of a vintage experience that I can't replicate any other way - 3DFX Glide has an aesthetic and responsiveness that's hard to match, analog ps/2 keyboard and mouse with no latency, VGA CRT monitor, Aureal A3D audio with some headphones.
It's a singular experience that is impossible to replicate today. And I love it.
Before DirectX, games and multimedia applications were designed to support a handful of cards, such as Soundblaster, Borland, Turtle Beach, and Ultrasound. There were no unified drivers, no standard interface, etc. A few middleware programs, such as Miles Audio, began to appear to manage multiple types of cards, but this was done at the application level.
With DirectX, integrated cards and various SB clones were supported out of the box as long as they had Windows drivers.
Very quickly, users realised that the built-in clones and cards were just enough for most uses.
Especially given the appalling quality of PC speakers at the time (I'll never forgive you Packard Bell).
Interesting angle. The product that actually made them mainstream (the Soundblaster) was everything but excellent - it had a single mono 8-bit DAC (compare this to the Amiga's 4 channel stereo sound, released four years prior!), and very noisy output as I recall. But it was supported by all software, so it won.
Also no mention of their very aggressive business practices, how they bankrupted Adlib by forcing Yamaha to not release a new sound chip for the upcoming Adlib Gold card - delayed until Creative were ready with their own product.
I was also one of the people who worked on the Nomad II MP3 player.
In the '90 they were renowned for many of their products (multimedia kits, anybody?). I remember having purchased a Sound Blaster Live and was kind of blown away at the time with its audio quality, maybe because what I had in my motherboard was really bad audio.
One of my siblings had a Creative Zen Vision for ages, it was rock solid to the point that he destroyed its case and audio jack and the thing still worked perfectly. It was possibly one of a few products I've seen that resisted so much and kept working.
I do understand that the market for audio players now are kind of niche/dead if you can run an audio player on your phone, but I would still buy a good quality and affordable audio player that is not polluted with android. Just put music and play it... Their audio players were nice, not the best in terms of software. I owned a Zen Pebble and a Zen Micro and at the time I was quite happy with them.
One thing that is not minor is that they never seemed to have any interest on supporting other OSes rather than Windows or MacOS (a sign that still reflects that they haven't adapted to today's open source movement). If it weren't for the OSS community their cards wouldn't work on Linux.
Another company that suffered a similar or worse fate is Turtle Beach. I remember that they sound cards were also renowed at the time. They now make headsets and joysticks. I guess both companies didn't learn to adapt to the unforgiving tech market and kind of perished.
I kind of wish the FP audio was replaced with a USB DAC header into the MB... the tiny cable that connects them just tends to suck imo. Aside from that, a minimal amount of gyro tech in headphones with a centering option could also go a long way toward positional audio support.
How did Creative end up with offices there? Was there some kind of research going on at Oklahoma State University?
AudioPCI rebranded devices later sold as SoundBlaster cheaper edition.
Here the built in demo songs of my SD-1 at action here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtV5J6ZLKuU
I also have an Soundblaster AWE64 (not entirely sure) with an Ensoniq chip on it. But the noise level of every Sound Blaster card is that bad, that you cannot really use it for professional recordings.
I also remember working a summer job to save up money for a Nomad. I would come home from work every day and check their website to see if it was available for purchase, and it never was. I eventually gave up on getting a Nomad and bought an RCA Lyra instead, which was a regrettable decision.
EXMP is the outstanding editor for all things Soundfont and EMU
SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 T6
good times.
0. https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/?manufacturerId=455&p...
lif•5mo ago
(iykyk)
bananaboy•5mo ago
disillusioned•5mo ago
I was then similarly obsessed with 4.1 sound in, eg, Half-Life, and other games, but also the dumb helicopter demo. My friends loved it too: no one else had a 4.1 system, so this was a Big Deal.
Eventually, some component or another failed in the sub/amp, and I moved on to the vaunted Logitech Z-5500, which was a pretty solid choice, but a lot "boomier" and less even.
I then migrated my way to the Klipsch ProMedia 5.1, which I am _still using today_, having kept it on life support by finding some guy online who refurbishes the very testy "BASH" boards inside them, and, after several swaps, eventually ordered a rebuilt amp with a newly designed BASH board that he had printed up.
No one makes true PC audio 5.1 systems anymore, really. Logitech has their Z906, which I could get if I had to, but my understanding is my precious little Klipsch system still kicks its ass.
But it all harkens back to the FPS2000. Cambridge Soundworks put something _special_ together with that bit of kit.