Suggestions for audio player microcontroller

David Brown · 2010-11-04T08:22:36+00:00

I'm looking for suggestions for a microcontroller for use in an audio player. This is going to be for a high-end player, not a mass-produced portable, so I'm not bothered about size or power consumption, nor am I worried about getting the lowest possible cost.It needs to have Ethernet for connecting to the outside world. Some support for wireless networking would be good too, if possible, but that can always be handled by external chips.It needs I2S outputs at 96 kHz or 192 kHz, 24-bit. It will be stereo only at the moment, but multi channel support is always interesting.It needs to support a range of formats - probably at least MP3, OGG Vorbis, FLAC, ALE/ALAC, AAC, WMA. This means codec-specific acceleration is of little use, and it will need a fair amount of processing power.My initial thoughts are the AVR32 and Cortex-M4 devices. I get the feeling that it would be too demanding for Cortex-M3 chips - it's the sort of application where the DSP instructions can be very useful.I'd rather avoid a DSP chip - I dislike dealing with massive, specialised, closed-source and expensive toolchains that are often required, and I dislike dealing with awkward DSP architectures that are optimised for very fast tight MAC loops but are poor at more general code. I prefer an "ordinary" processor with DSP instructions.Any thoughts, experiences or suggestions are welcome.

Nov 04, 2010 41 Replies

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Petter Gustad 15 years ago

OK, I get it.

I used to like those VIA based Mini-ITX and Pico-ITX boards a lot, but most of the Atom based Mini-ITX based boards seem to be a lot cheaper:

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Petter

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David Brown 15 years ago

Thanks for the tip. I knew the Intel based boards were cheaper than they used to be, but not that they are cheaper than the Via ones.

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