Decoding MP3 requires about 24 MIPS on a DSP at minimum. On a general purpose CPU, a 66MHz 486 or 68040 can just about do it at quality. The Mac SE is nowhere close.

IIRC on a 486 DX/66 running Windows 95 you had to set Winamp to decode at half quality in order for playback to not skip (on a 128kbps file)

Yes, the fastest 486 systems could just barely do full-quality 44.1/16 MP3 decoding (DX4/100, etc) Even then a DOS player was a better bet than Winamp.

A SE/30 would be absolutely screwed.

As a comparison a basic home theatre pc these days with ryzen 1500x cpu, and GeForce 1030 fanless with GPU accelerated hevc in the video drivers, can decode up to about 350Mbps bitrate of HEVC 2160p 60fps using the latest VLC build. Beyond that it starts dropping frames.

edit: tests run using sample videos from here, if anyone wants to see what bitrate of 4K they can play back before it starts losing frames.

http://jell.yfish.us/

That sounds right - I think I could just push my 486 DX2/66 with Gravis Ultrasound to do 128kbps playback if I dropped into DOS and used Cubic Player.

On my Toshiba Libretto 30 I could get decent playback with the Fraunhofer decoder but not winamp, it was that marginal.

MpegDec is able to play MP3s on 68040 Macs (although with lowered quality settings and maybe even only mono). An SE/30 with an accelerator might be capable at really low quality.

http://www.jwgdesign.com/mpegdec/about.htm

My Amiga managed to do half-quality mono with a 40 MHz 030 under the bonnet (Hippoplayer IIRC). The 16 MHz 030 in the SE/30 would most likely not be able to do that in real-time, assuming that decoder isn't much more efficient compared to the MP3 datatype I used for the Amiga.

EDIT: Checked the web site. They're using the same encoder

I love thread like this where I can identify people's general age based on hardware they talk about. Ah daystar accelerator.

"Intel Inboard 386" and "Above Board Six Pack Plus"

I wonder how Opus compares, apples-to-apples on quality.

Perhaps a touch too dismissive when a huge amount of work and ingenuity has gone into this. I use Spotify Connect on my phone all the time to control other players, it's genuinely very useful.

I don't think he was being dismissive; the title of this submission is deceitful. I also expected that the Mac would be doing the decoding and playing.

It's amazing how for granted we take such a task as decoding MP3s when (in the grand scheme of things) it wasn't that long ago we were using computers to do what seemed to be far more advanced tasks, that were unable to do something as "simple" as decoding a music file.

I have vague recollections of my first introduction to MP3 and thought at the time "this is definitely the future" and as soon as one of the first hardware MP3 players came out (MPMan? MP3Man? Something like that) I was straight on it.

Of course, it could only hold a handful of songs, I think it might have had 32Mb storage and had to be fairly choosey with what songs I'd take with me but it was brilliant, certainly for the time.

I seem to recall my second MP3 player was a Creative Nomad but I'm sure it would only play WMA files, there was something about it that ended up being a massive pain involving converting MP3 files and so didn't have it for that long.

Is it the Diamond Rio PMP 300 you’re thinking of?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_PMP300

That thing was awesome and really blew people away with how small modern electronics could be. Re-encoding mp3 files at 16kpbs (so you could fit a decent amount on the 32MB) made the music sound like crap but we didn’t care.

A lot of people think the Rio was the first commercial MP3 player, but GP seems to probably be thinking of the actual first commercial MP3 player, the MPMan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPMan

That was it! MPMan. It cost a fortune but it felt like the future.

Good feeling, it was the future! People still pay $400 for an mp3 player, but it's also a phone and a computer now

> using a Mac SE/30 to display what A Spotify client/player is playing.

It's quite a nice philosophical question who does the playing. Isn't the Spotify iOS app also just displaying what is being played by the iPhone ADC/MPEG Decoder/Network Library/Spotify Server?

Sure, but an iPhone CPU could decode mp3 easily. If the SE/30 CPU was decoding that would be impressive

Back in the day I had trouble playing 128 kbit/s MP3s in Winamp on PowerPC 603e 75 MHz (Mac Performa 5200), so no way it can work on 68030

I thought Spotify used a proprietary codec?

Spotify uses AAC and Ogg Vorbis: https://support.spotify.com/us/using_spotify/system_settings...

Anyone know if there was a change in quality when it was named "Extreme" vs what is now called "Very high"?