7 ms·

"I do not tend to listen to music through my workstation, since that both distracts me and wastes cpu power. My workstation is a dual CPU, 500 MHZ system, but I

"I do not tend to listen to music through my workstation, since that both distracts me and wastes cpu power. My workstation is a dual CPU, 500 MHZ system, but I like things to work fast, not be bogged down with decompressing music, etc." (Jon Hall)

raverbashing 11y ago
Which is funny because the effect was important on a 100MHz Pentium, but pretty much negligible beyond that.
- 72deluxe 11y ago
  How this is true. My brother had an Elonex Pentium 120Mhz laptop, and that was truly brought to its knees when playing an MP3. Playing mods and xms was alright, unless they were complicated. Encoding MP3s was another thing altogether - I was wowed when a schoolmate had a dual CPU machine that ENCODED faster than it ripped CDs. I could only dream of such a thing - encoding was far far far slower than reading the data from the CD in the first place.
  - tpurves 11y ago
    Yep I remember this too. In my engineering college days 97/98 in the 90s we were fairly aggressive early adopters of mp3s. We quickly learned that to reliably dj a party with just mp3s you needed at least someone with a 133MHz Pentium to not stutter or have issues on any tracks.
- pjc50 11y ago
  I had a Toshiba Libretto 30 with a 486DX processor at 100MHz that was exactly on the boundary. It could play MP3s, but only with the Fraunhofer codec: WinAMP was not quite fast enough. It was a lovely little machine that I set up to dual-boot Linux. If it had had mobile networking it would have been fantastic.
  - jandrese 11y ago
    I was able to play MP3s on my Pentium 75 using "amp" on FreeBSD, but they would stutter if I fired up Netscape at the same time and started scrolling the window around. I remember it took some time before I could play MP3s--for about a year I was stuck playing MP2s instead.
  - unsignedint 11y ago
    I remember that boundary. Well, I was stuck with way less than that boundary; I had 486DX2 66MHz, which was way underpowered to do any MP3. There were software for Windows that could play MP3s at reduced quality. I don't know if I had any counterpart of that for Linux at the time... I've then replaced CPU with one of the AMD upgrade processor (perhaps 486DX 100MHz equivalent or better, I don't quite remember the detail as it was a long time ago), and that's when I could start playing MP3s.
rograndom 11y ago
I remember when I had a ~100mhz Cyrix 4/586 clone that I used to do desktop publishing (Photoshop, Quark, etc) in the mid-late 1990s. Plenty fast for that, but it could on play 128kbps MP3s if nothing else was running. I would have a tape deck hooked up to to the audio out so I could make cassette tapes for my car from MP3s. That got replaced with a actual 166mhz Pentium MMX. That one had no problem playing MP3s along with the regular work. Same with the next machine that was a Celeron overclocked to 400mhz. I could only imagine how I would waste dual 500mhz processors at that time!
- jlgaddis 11y ago
  That last sentence brought back some memories for me, like when the ABIT BP6 motherboard came out (it was the first of its kind). I just HAD to have one, so I got one and stuck a pair of 500 MHz Celerons in it. That thing was sooooo faaaast! It was so much more powerful than my previous machines (a 486SX/25 w/ 4 MB of RAM and then a P100 w/ 32 MB of RAM)! I remember putting it together and wondering "how am I ever going to use this machine at anything near its full potential?" This is a great reminder (to me) that, even though it doesn't seem like it sometimes, technology really does change so damn fast.
  - EdSharkey 11y ago
    I had one too, and it WAS fast! I built it from parts I got at the Oakland Computer Show. It was my beloved "duallie". :)
- ChrisClark 11y ago
  I remember the first MP3 player I downloaded had to spend some time buffering before it started playing the song. It must have been on my old 386.
macNchz 11y ago
I remember this being a concern around when mp3s started to become popular–it's quite amazing how far we've come since the age where an mp3 would soak up an appreciable amount of CPU and saturate an internet connection seemingly forever while downloading. I just started playing an old mp3 file on my new-ish MacBook and was surprised that it was using 15% CPU...before I realized that it was actually loading it from the cloud storage that holds my 7000 song/50gb music library for next to no cost (it dropped to 1% CPU moments later after it had buffered)–never mind having subscription access to essentially all the world's music.

raverbashing 11y ago

Which is funny because the effect was important on a 100MHz Pentium, but pretty much negligible beyond that.

72deluxe 11y ago
How this is true. My brother had an Elonex Pentium 120Mhz laptop, and that was truly brought to its knees when playing an MP3. Playing mods and xms was alright, unless they were complicated. Encoding MP3s was another thing altogether - I was wowed when a schoolmate had a dual CPU machine that ENCODED faster than it ripped CDs. I could only dream of such a thing - encoding was far far far slower than reading the data from the CD in the first place.
- tpurves 11y ago
  Yep I remember this too. In my engineering college days 97/98 in the 90s we were fairly aggressive early adopters of mp3s. We quickly learned that to reliably dj a party with just mp3s you needed at least someone with a 133MHz Pentium to not stutter or have issues on any tracks.
pjc50 11y ago
I had a Toshiba Libretto 30 with a 486DX processor at 100MHz that was exactly on the boundary. It could play MP3s, but only with the Fraunhofer codec: WinAMP was not quite fast enough. It was a lovely little machine that I set up to dual-boot Linux. If it had had mobile networking it would have been fantastic.
- jandrese 11y ago
  I was able to play MP3s on my Pentium 75 using "amp" on FreeBSD, but they would stutter if I fired up Netscape at the same time and started scrolling the window around. I remember it took some time before I could play MP3s--for about a year I was stuck playing MP2s instead.
- unsignedint 11y ago
  I remember that boundary. Well, I was stuck with way less than that boundary; I had 486DX2 66MHz, which was way underpowered to do any MP3. There were software for Windows that could play MP3s at reduced quality. I don't know if I had any counterpart of that for Linux at the time... I've then replaced CPU with one of the AMD upgrade processor (perhaps 486DX 100MHz equivalent or better, I don't quite remember the detail as it was a long time ago), and that's when I could start playing MP3s.

rograndom 11y ago

I remember when I had a ~100mhz Cyrix 4/586 clone that I used to do desktop publishing (Photoshop, Quark, etc) in the mid-late 1990s. Plenty fast for that, but it could on play 128kbps MP3s if nothing else was running. I would have a tape deck hooked up to to the audio out so I could make cassette tapes for my car from MP3s. That got replaced with a actual 166mhz Pentium MMX. That one had no problem playing MP3s along with the regular work. Same with the next machine that was a Celeron overclocked to 400mhz. I could only imagine how I would waste dual 500mhz processors at that time!

jlgaddis 11y ago
That last sentence brought back some memories for me, like when the ABIT BP6 motherboard came out (it was the first of its kind). I just HAD to have one, so I got one and stuck a pair of 500 MHz Celerons in it. That thing was sooooo faaaast! It was so much more powerful than my previous machines (a 486SX/25 w/ 4 MB of RAM and then a P100 w/ 32 MB of RAM)! I remember putting it together and wondering "how am I ever going to use this machine at anything near its full potential?" This is a great reminder (to me) that, even though it doesn't seem like it sometimes, technology really does change so damn fast.
- EdSharkey 11y ago
  I had one too, and it WAS fast! I built it from parts I got at the Oakland Computer Show. It was my beloved "duallie". :)
ChrisClark 11y ago
I remember the first MP3 player I downloaded had to spend some time buffering before it started playing the song. It must have been on my old 386.

macNchz 11y ago

I remember this being a concern around when mp3s started to become popular–it's quite amazing how far we've come since the age where an mp3 would soak up an appreciable amount of CPU and saturate an internet connection seemingly forever while downloading. I just started playing an old mp3 file on my new-ish MacBook and was surprised that it was using 15% CPU...before I realized that it was actually loading it from the cloud storage that holds my 7000 song/50gb music library for next to no cost (it dropped to 1% CPU moments later after it had buffered)–never mind having subscription access to essentially all the world's music.