Just to add more detail to this thread.
The Apple MPEG Media System card has a TMS320AV110 chip. While other TMS320 chips are general purpose DSPs and this chip has "DSP" written on it, To sold this specifically as a MPEG-1 audio decoding chip, further more, it supports MPEG-1 layer 1, and MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio, and not MPEG-1 Layer 3 (aka MP3). This distinction means it isn't going to be playing your MP3 collection straight out of the box unless someone does some clever programming using the chip in ways that weren't intended (really wish they'd just fitted a general purpose DSP!). Perhaps it is possible to use the chip in a different way to intended, but I haven't found much documentation and what I did find claimed it is single application.
Anyway, that aside, the best option then would be to make a player that plays MP2 audio files. They wouldn't be as highly compressed, but it is a format commonly used for broadcast and streams, so probably plenty good enough. When I have some free time I might look into this. It shouldn't be terrible to do - should be able to use QuickTime to do all the heavy lifting. What would be nice about this was that it would have a reasonable amount of compression and be able to play in the background while you did other stuff, with minimal CPU overhead. Kind of like CD audio, but you can stuff an SD full of albums and stick it on random.
The Apple MPEG Media System card has a TMS320AV110 chip. While other TMS320 chips are general purpose DSPs and this chip has "DSP" written on it, To sold this specifically as a MPEG-1 audio decoding chip, further more, it supports MPEG-1 layer 1, and MPEG-1 Layer 2 audio, and not MPEG-1 Layer 3 (aka MP3). This distinction means it isn't going to be playing your MP3 collection straight out of the box unless someone does some clever programming using the chip in ways that weren't intended (really wish they'd just fitted a general purpose DSP!). Perhaps it is possible to use the chip in a different way to intended, but I haven't found much documentation and what I did find claimed it is single application.
Anyway, that aside, the best option then would be to make a player that plays MP2 audio files. They wouldn't be as highly compressed, but it is a format commonly used for broadcast and streams, so probably plenty good enough. When I have some free time I might look into this. It shouldn't be terrible to do - should be able to use QuickTime to do all the heavy lifting. What would be nice about this was that it would have a reasonable amount of compression and be able to play in the background while you did other stuff, with minimal CPU overhead. Kind of like CD audio, but you can stuff an SD full of albums and stick it on random.
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