Flac player
 

For those who don't know, this is free lossless audio codec.
And I have a player to handle these on the Amiga. Yes.

It's been long I coded this one. However it never really got released because it was impractical to use (and a few buggy).
But I finally turned it into a usable player (well, sort of).
Hence this program.
Also made some translating effort so that there is an english version ;)

To be fetched here :
http://meynaf.free.fr/pr/spl.lzx

Choose the one you want from english and french in the relevant sub-dir and put it somewhere in the path. It doesn't need any particular software installed, however it uses 14bit calibration where available (highly recommended on real miggies, but don't try that on emulators).

Minimal configuration to play flacs realtime is 68030/50 - and some may still fail. Trying with lower lpc setting when encoding can help (lowering the replay frequency also does, of course).
On 68060 there should however be no problem.
If your machine is too slow, don't panic ! It can still decode to a file.
Bare minimum is similar as unexpanded A1200 (68020, OS 3.x).

For now, it's cli only. If someone wants to make a nice gui, just speak :cheese

Usage :
spl <file> [options]
where options can be :
- save as aiff file : saveas file.aiff
- play n times : loop n
- set volume : vol n (if 14-bit is used, can boost up to 800)
- show basic information : info
- play 44.1 in 2:1 (22.05 khz, fastest but not so good) : method 0 (this is the default)
- play 44.1 in 5:3 (26.46 khz, accurate but slow) : method 1
- play 44.1 in 8:5 (27.563 khz, relative fast) : method 2
- play 44.1 directly (req. vga/dblpal display) : method 3

To stop the replay before the end, press ctrl-c. If there is no output window then you'll have to send it a break with another program (like artm or xoper).

Note : fully OS compliant software. Does proper audio allocation. Should exit cleanly and not do enforcer hits, nor have any resource leaks.
(If you find otherwise, time for a bug report :p)

The program has more features than documented here because they're not finished.
Normally it should also play aiff, wave, iff-8svx, and a few others (but they're unfinished).

Congrats, I'll certainly try it on my A1200 with Blizzard 1260/66 and I'll give you a feedback!
Thanks!

Nice, Thx Meynaf! Any plans for Opus?

What do you mean by "Opus" ?

I guess he means the opus audio format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_%28audio_format%29

Ok then.
That may be possible, if i find a good reference implementation with some suitable test files and the format itself isn't too much of a cpu hog.

Wow, impressive.

Excellent meynaf :lol !
Vorbis, Opus & FLAC are the formats I use the most for my CD. Vorbis for my "old" iRiver players (I challenge anybody to find another player that last so long with a single AA battery ;) ). Opus & FLAC for other players (regarding format support those players have of course).
Thank you, great work & will give a try :great !

I didn't know about Opus before, but Vorbis was already on the to do list. Should be in 060 range (btw Opus looks to heavy for this, similar to AAC).

Btw., if you convert an AIFF/WAV (source) to FLAC and then reconvert to AIFF/WAV (destination) would source and destination differ in bytes and/or sound quality?

ps: With AHIRecord you can record in FLAC format and at least have Play16 for playback. meynaf, you may want to compare your player with Play16?

Differ in bytes, maybe. Headers and information packets can change.
Differ in sound quality, no. FLAC is lossless and so are AIFF/WAV.


Play16 doesn't play FLAC, does it ?

Oh sorry, I thought there was an update of Play16 that supports FLAC but confused with AmigaAMP or something else.

Opus is merged vorbis + speex (both with improvements) - Opus has many faces (like low latency etc). And at least theoretically it is not affected by patents pool. Anyway mp3 is no longer covered by patents, same for mpeg-2.

I've read about Opus. Low latency isn't useful for a file player ; in fact, it looks like we'll have the time to decode several mp3 frames before a single opus frame is decoded...
And they did the same mistake Flac and several others did before : no easy way to find out the duration.
(Actually an horror on Flac because you not only have to parse frame headers like in mp3, but also to decode the whole thing...)

Btw I'm currently on the lookout for mpeg audio layer 1 files. Layer 3 is of course easy to get and there are a few layer 2 on aminet iirc. But i'd like to support all three in future versions so example files are needed.


So... no bug report ? Did anyone test it ?

Not yet (not enough spare time) :p

I would test but my miggy hasn't internet connection and the floppy way over the linux pc doesn't work for any reason.

Can't a en/decoder like lame produce layer 1 files?

At least ffmpeg does not. Not checked lame yet.

EDIT: nope. Lame only encodes layer 3.

SamplitudeOpus can save as (export) mpeg layer I and II.

I can't find it anywhere. Do you have some link ?

Try this:
http://www.amigafuture.de/downloads....cc4ec179da4bb6
or
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80056