[Sunhelp] Decoding/playing MP3's on Classic

[James Lockwood]

On Sun, 7 May 2000, Robert Gash wrote:

> Unfortunately, my knowledge of sox (which I think is needed to convert
> into the proper sunaudio format) and how to play sounds on sun equipment
> is very limited.  Has anyone else been crazy enough to try this and
> actually succeed on any of the lower-end Sun hardware?  If you have, I'd
> really apperciate some advice on how you did it.

The Classic was the last Sun produced with the old AMD 79C30 audio
chipset.  This "telephone quality" audio subsystem is only capable of
playing sounds at 8KHz mono (using 8-bit ulaw encoding).  It will play
mp3 audio but very poorly.

Its sister machine, the LX, is identical in CPU performance but has a
48KHz/16-bit stereo audio chipset and is quite a nice little corner mp3
box.

-James