greetings!

I was wondering if someone here knows a portable (hard-drive) player that supports the .mod/xm/it/s3m/etc formats, if it exists? And preferably mp3 too

Thanks in advance.

I never heard of something like that. My bet would be that officially, no such player does exist. Via modding the firmware of an existing player, it may be possible - however, the problem would be resource-requirements: modules(especially with lots of channels) need way more CPU-speed to be played than i.e. MP3.

This info probably doesn't help you but I tried IBXM a while ago which is a Java MOD/XM player with pure integer arithmetic. IIRC it can run on handhelds or something.

Then there's the iRiver H120/H140. The Rockboxx team (which works on an open source firmware for these devices) planned to support module formats as well. AFAIK the current build doesn't support it yet.

Sebi

Ummm, at home I have Amiga with 68040/50MHz CPU and I never saw a module which I wouldn't be able to play on it, playing an MP3 is not quite possible though.
Maybe if module consisted of compressed samples (which could or even should be decompressed before the playback anyway), synthesized sounds, used a lot of channels, DSP, and the player would interpolate with some advenced algorithm, then maybe it would be harder to play than MP3, but I'm sure that 99.9% of existing modules are nowhere near as hard to play as MP3. Actually I also have Amiga with 68020/14MHz CPU and it sill is able to play most of the popular module formats.

It really depends on the amount of active channels, the quality you are targetting and whether hardware acceleration can be used or not. Most software players do linear interpolation of the samples without anti-alias filtering which is pretty fast but crap (qualitywise). The amiga has 4 seperate "hardware channels" which do the resampling and mixing is done in hardware IIRC.

I heard "modplug" to be a high quality software player -- gotta check out for myself if they resample accurately ...


Sebi

Modplug does the trick for me, but I've heard XMPlay is better: http://www.un4seen.com/xmplay.html
Never tried that myself though.

Hmm, would there by any chance be a *good* mod-to-mp3 program then?

PSP plays MODs (just don't patch to 1.51, 1.52, 2.0)

PSP Media Center

edit: oh, hard drive player... >_> nevermind
edit2: altho, you could get a hell of a lot of MODs on a 512 memorystick...

Yuck. Throw that crap away. The tracker is OK, but the player core is not very quirks friendly.


You heard right. XMPlay is way better than Modplug.


foobar2000 and foo_dumb work great in a pinch for batch conversion. You can configure it for a variable number of loops if you want, or no looping. I also tried hard to adapt it to ProTracker and FastTracker 2 quirks as I discovered them, so you may even find it supports more quirks than XMPlay. It already supports more odd formats, like 669, PSM (both old and new versions) and PTM.

Some day, I am going to have to publish that adapted source code... I already shared with a few people, but it really needs to take off. Although it may not be the optimal choice for an embedded player, considering existing solutions based on mplayer or other solutions, which are likely using libmodplug.

lol yeah, same for midis I bet



Yeah, I use the tracker as player
But I'll check the other programs too, who knows I might be hearing tunes incorrectly all the time...

edit: heh, turns out the modplug tracker already has a save as mp3/wav function, that (as far as I tested) seems to do the job alright?

In standard 4 channel modules with 8bit samples there wasn't really such a thing as resampling or mixing.
Paula chip (now nearly 25 years old) which among other things was responsible for Amiga sound, as you said had 4 separate hardware channels (2 channels per speaker), you could feed a channel with 1 sample at a time, it wasn't possible to mix more with hardware.
As for resampling, the chip wasn't bound to a given frequency like it is today, you could play any sample at any sample-rate (different for every of the 4 channels) without any resampling nor interpolation. Funny thing is that the highest possible sample-rate was a function of horizontal frequency of video-mode, in PAL you could play samples at sample-rates up to ~28KHz (in NTSC a bit more), in a so called DblPAL/NTSC (modes with no interlacing in high video resolutions - for VGA & MultiSync monitors) it was ~56KHz, and there was a whole bunch more of video-modes. Funny machines was those Amigas.
To have more than 4 channels & 8bits you had to do software mixing & resampling. Since you had 2 channels per speaker you could do a trick with playing 2 slightly adjusted 8bit samples to gain ~14bit output. To have more than 4 channels you had to mix them into these 4 channels, but all the processing for these tricks had to be done by the CPU.
I remember making 8 channel modules with 14bit output on 68020/14MHz based Amiga. Later when I got 68040/50MHz I could throw in more channels and some DSP, and still there was a plenty of spare CPU time.
I know that playing MODs on PCs or portables is different (you always need to mix & resample), but it's still nothing in comparison to MP3 decoding.

BTW, when you play a standard 4-channel Amiga MOD, turn off any interpolation - then it sounds like it should. Interpolation should be used only with MODs with more than 4 channels and the ones coming from PC trackers.

Sorry for being off-topic but ...
How do you want to get "14 bit output" ??

btw: the early sound blaster cards had a similar mode of accepting samples (NOT via DMA). It was pretty slow, though.

[edit]
Ah! Let me guess: You can set a volume between 0-64 for each hardware channel. Two channels on each side. Set one's volume to 64 and the other one's to 1. The final output weill be (sample-of-chan1*64+sample-of-chan2), right ?

In order to make this work the two channels have to be in sync perfectly, thoguh.
[/edit]


Sebi

Exactly.