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Building a Spotify Player for My Mac SE/30
- flocial 8y agoThe title doesn't do the post justice. This is an amazing use of a vintage Macintosh and the technical details are quite interesting.
- Fnoord 8y agoIts an awesome demo, but if you pay your own electricity bill old hardware such as this just isn't practical. At least not in my country with our energy prices.
- wazoox 8y agoThe SE/30 power supply is only 100W, so it doesn't burn that much.
- rocky1138 8y agoYou're both right, but i see his/her point since I also have to pay my own electricity bill. A Raspberry Pi or similiar hardware will do this at an order of magnitude cheaper. Still, for romance reasons, I much prefer the solution in the article. Sometimes it's just worth the extra small bit of money for the romance
- fhood 8y agoOk, so I have always assumed that since a lot of this old hardware doesn't use anywhere near the level of cooling that a modern machine does, se/30 motherboard doesn't appear to bother with a CPU fan or heatsink, it uses a great deal less power. Am I incorrect in this, or is it all just the CRT?
- fitzroy 8y agoNot sure why this was downvoted as it's a valid issue. For the last 16 years I've used some kind of Mac hooked up to a stereo receiver as a media server and had a similar concern. 2002 - 2006 G4 tower 2006 - 2016 2006 Mac Mini 2016 - now 2012 Mac Mini For music, the Mac Mini is used headless via screensharing. But it's set to never sleep because it sometimes doesn't wake up properly. I'm always curious if an Apple TV would basically pay for itself over a few years with reduced power consumption vs having Mini with an 12TB external dual-drive running 24/7 (the drives do spin down on their own though). edit: formatting edit2: I did some rough math. Apple TV at idle (2w) vs 2012 Mac Mini at idle (11w) = 9w difference. At roughly $0.20/kWh the 32GB Apple TV 4k ($179) would pay for itself in just over 11 years. Probably sooner because: 1. Electricity prices are likely to increase in the next decade. 2. Assuming the power usage difference is higher when actually playing/streaming music (given how bloated iTunes has become). 3. Even more power saved when streaming Netflix / Amazon Prime on Apple TV vs in Chrome on the Mac Mini (and up to 4k vs 720p on Chrome).
- flocial 8y agoTotally valid point and I agree. There's a lot of nostalgia around retro/vintage but the truth is technology has improved in so many ways over the years. But again nostalgia is more a sentimental thing and seeing a Spotify interface in grainy pixels really hits me in the feels.
- King-Aaron 8y agoI'd love to have this in my living room as the primary stereo, just for the aesthetic quality.
- ianlevesque 8y agoSuper cool! I’m a little surprised nobody has backported a TLS implementation though.
- mrpippy 8y agoI'm personally maintaining mbed TLS for classic Mac (68k included) for use in a libssh2-powered SSH client (an update of MacSSH). It works well on PPC, but I haven't benchmarked it on a 68k Mac yet. Without any optimized assembly, I fear it might be really slow. https://github.com/bslabs/mbedtls/tree/macos https://github.com/bslabs/mbedtls/tree/macos
- ianlevesque 8y agoOh cool, I knew there had to be one. The Spotify responses should be pretty small other than the images, so unless the handshake was really expensive it might be ok (small key sizes?)
- zozbot123 8y agoDoesn't TLS kindof have the same issues as MP3 decoding? IIRC, there are YT videos of modern linux being installed on something as old as AMD '586' processors (somewhat inbetween a top-of-the-line 486 and a first-gen Pentium) and SSL/TLS turns out to be a CPU hog.
- bl4ckneon 8y agoPractical? Hell no Coolest thing I've seen in a while? Hell ya! Good job on this, this is some awesome functional art!
- fencepost 8y agoThis is interesting, but I'd call it more "using a Mac SE/30 to display what A Spotify client/player is playing." I was curious about whether a SE/30 was actually able to keep up with decoding modern mp3 streams - I seem to recall newer processors than those running under significant load in the early days of Winamp. Edit for relevance: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2672/why-does-mp3-audio-decoding-overwhelm-retro-cpus https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2672/why-...
- pavlov 8y agoDecoding 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.
- tomc1985 8y agoIIRC 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)
- einr 8y agoYes, 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.
- walrus01 8y agoAs 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/ http://jell.yfish.us/
- SyneRyder 8y ago
- ngcc_hk 8y agoJust watching civil war and wonder why Spider-Man collect a mac/se. Can it be used today? Here it goes.
- dotdi 8y agoI don't remember the last time I was this impressed by a post on HN. Bravo!
- spongeb00b 8y agoIt’s built on Retro68, a gcc based cross-compiler for building classic Mac apps on modern machines: https://github.com/autc04/Retro68 https://github.com/autc04/Retro68
- 8bitsrule 8y ago"The speaker itself streams and plays the music, and the Mac simply tells the speaker which song to play...." I was unaware that you could now get speakers with that kind of horsepower built-in. What's their typical use-case?
- latchkey 8y agoExpensive, but looks like they do a lot: https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/speaker_systems/nx-n500/ https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/speaker_systems...
- codetrotter 8y agoAlternatively you could buy something like the Yamaha MusicCast WXAD-10. It’s a little Spotify Connect enabled box that you plug your speakers into and it has a price tag of about 140 EUR in Europe ($160). I haven’t tested it or listened to it myself but the first and only review I checked was favorable. https://europe.yamaha.com/en/products/audio_visual/accessories/wxad-10/index.html https://europe.yamaha.com/en/products/audio_visual/accessori... https://www.avforums.com/review/yamaha-wxad-10-musiccast-adapter-review.13581 https://www.avforums.com/review/yamaha-wxad-10-musiccast-ada... Likewise, a lot of AV receivers come with Spotify Connect these days. For example, Onkyo TX-NR585 ($380) which was recommended by CNET. https://www.onkyousa.com/Products/model.php?m=TX-NR585&class=Receiver&source=prodClass https://www.onkyousa.com/Products/model.php?m=TX-NR585&class... https://www.cnet.com/topics/av-receivers/best-av-receivers/ https://www.cnet.com/topics/av-receivers/best-av-receivers/ That’s not to say that one should buy an AV receiver for this purpose alone. I only mentioned it because (a) some people might have a Spotify Connect capable receiver already without being aware of it or (b) they are planning on buying a receiver anyway and so might wish to consider this alongside their other criteria.
- pingiun 8y agoYou could also use a chromecast audio, which should work with spotify: https://www.spotify.com/en/chromecastaudio/ https://www.spotify.com/en/chromecastaudio/
- muterad_murilax 8y agoWhy is the video muted?
- clever-cleaver 8y agoCopyright.
- fabricexpert 8y agoSmart. I was just about to go out and buy a CD and then I saw this YT video, I was thinking great! Now I can listen to Phil Collins for free! Then I realised there was no audio. So I went and purchased the CD and now I realise how immoral it would have been to watch this video without paying the artist's record label their fees. Phew
- npunt 8y agoThe creator of this (ants) also made a classic Mac wifi extension which is also a brilliant little backport of modern wifi selection UI. https://github.com/antscode/MacWifi https://github.com/antscode/MacWifi
- dschuler 8y agoThis is so cool. I mean, I would've futzed around with HyperCard for 100 hours before getting half of this to work. Good job! For all the posters that are going on about MP3 decoding, yes, we remember how decoding MP3s used to take up 80% of our Pentium 120 CPU cycles. Until MMX came along. Those dancing fab engineers saved our CPU cycles. Anyway, who knows how Ogg Vorbis would've decoded from Spotify back then - probably not well! The major advances since then have been out-of-order instruction execution and SIMD instructions (although we still don't have general vector processors, as Hennessy & Patterson still lament in the 5th edition). (My mother used to tell me I was getting a 486 instead of a Pentium 66 when I bas being a brat.. the terror it used to strike in me! unreal.)
- Rjevski 8y agoI’m more impressed by having WiFi on such a Mac rather than the Spotify client itself.
- justusthane 8y agoIf you didn't see it, here's his walkthrough of how he did the wi-fi. Very cool! https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/31078-adding-wi-fi-to-my-mac-se30/ https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/31078-adding-wi-f...
- alex_suzuki 8y agoThis is absolutely amazing. I‘m extremely impressed with the engineering behind this, especially the details like the OAuth bridge or the WiFi adapter.
- InGodsName 8y agoAmazon's music player has no ability to download music to your pc.
- pocketstar 8y agoJust pulled my Mac SE out of storage. Great to see what the little machine can still do!
- pasbesoin 8y agoI'm afraid to start mine up without re-capping it. But, I don't know much about that. Any relevant tips? With regard to OP, workaround for the "hug of death": https://web.archive.org/web/20181219174629/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/55998-building-a-spotify-player-for-my-mac-se30/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181219174629/https://68kmla.or... P.S. I should probably also re-cap my Kaypro 2x. If the drives will even still work; what does one do about the belts and such in those? And what does one lubricate their rails and friction points with? Sorry if this is too OT, but I figure this kind of story may attract people who know these things. Finally, this coming year, I may be moving to a place that gives me space and energy to take on these hobby projects.