Any recommendations for audio player microcontrollers?

couple of solutions here to make life easier:

but you would still need a micro to run these off the shelf solutions.

Cheers Don...

Looks like if you use the chip, only, you can program it:

This depends on how many seconds at which bit resolution you want to store.

A cheaper solution than the VLSI chip could be to use a standard low-cost microcontroller with sufficient flash. Most microcontrollers have a PWM output. Add an external FET and lowpass filter for some cents, and you can drive a loudspeaker with it.

The only drawback is that flash in microcontrollers is expensive. If you use something like 16k flash, the sound memory would be less than a second, if uncompressed. Would be interesting to see, if it is possible to implement e.g. a decoder for the free Ogg Vorbis format (MP3 requires license fee for each device, or a really big one-time fee) in a small and slow microcontroller.

Another idea: just buy a 500k serial flash for less than $1 (in higher quantities), which can store more than 20 seconds uncompressed 8 bit audio data.

if you really have a lot of audio clips, then this may work for you:

Don...

Real programmers implement their own SD card readers with a PIC16F690, if you really need lots of audio data, with LCD, oscilloscope, accelerometer, speaker and Pong integrated :-)

nice work, nice video :-)

Don...

That is high fidelity in the treble range. Normally required telephone quality audio requires 3.5 kHz only. Similarly telephone bass falls off at 300 Hz.

I've heard people do nothing but bad-mouth PIC microcontrollers on this newsgroup... which is suprising after seeing that video.

Hi Don,

Thanks for your inputs. The device that I'm building is a small portable device (wrist-watch, belt, whatever) that gives out sound effects (each 1~5 seconds, and a total of 8~256 clips) on user command. For sound quality, I might need it to be better than telephone because many sound effects will lose its thrill if they are too distorted.

Do you have any good cheap microcontroller (I don't need a lot of features) that's small, low power, and have fast access to like 4M memory?

Thanks.

Cheers, Hoi

You don't have to put a filesystem on an SD card. Just invent a storage format you like and store and image of it in a binary file. Then use a tool like dd to copy it to the device file representing the raw card - trivial under linux, do-able but a bit trickier under some versions of windows. And of course possible if you initialize the card in your embedded device by downloading data to it.

Please do not top-post. Your answer belongs after (or intermixed with) the quoted material to which you reply, after snipping all irrelevant material. This top-post has lost all the preceding quotes. See the following links:

(taming google) (newusers)

Search for information on the Chinese line of MCUs "Jaztek." There shoul be some good leads in this group as well. It can be hard to track dow samples you need but its exactly what you are looking for. From what understand this line of chips are popular in the toy industry.

If you'd like help tracking down more info or datasheets feel free t email.

Op Sat, 31 May 2008 21:08:04 +0200 schreef Hoi Wong :

Quality is also greatly influenced by the audio equipment.

To reduce response time, you could store the first part of (a portion of) the samples in a faster medium (like RAM).

Define cheap, small, low and fast.

Hi Hoi,

I have worked on a few audio reference designs over the past few years with my company.

We have an ST7 based WAV file player, but it uses external M25Pxx memory to hold the data. Works up to 32kHz. Low cost option, and sounds quite good. Have also written some PC WAV file converter and ROM builder software to accompany this.

Microchip have an ADPCM solution (free if you use their devices).

If you want to go for higher quality, less memory storage then I have an STR9 based MP3 player based on Helix MP3 routines, and EFSL filesystem (SD-card).

Am working on ogg vobis now. Although CPU is struggling, need to add FreeRTOS and do some optimizing...

Let me know if you want schematics / code, and I will send...

Cheers,

Martin.

I would be greatly interested in getting the ST7 package.

regards,

-jim

Renesas has an ADPCM based solution that lets you use internal Flas memory or external Flash to play-back 11-16Khz, 16 bit compressed audio o the M16C and R8C microcontrollers.

There are multiple examples, schematics, sound samples and even WAV t ADPCM converter that runs on a PC. It all works with the Renesas Compile and IDE called HEW.

This is a really inexpensive way to go (free compiler up to 64k of code) and you can even use a 20 PIN SSOP package device. Audio quality can b very good with the right LP Filter and amp.

-- CG