Hello fellow IIGS users, I was looking through an old post of mine detailing how to convert MP3 files to IIGS format. At the time, I even floated the idea with Max Jones of JuicedGS newsletter for doing an article on the process but the files were too large to send to him in one piece so I had to split them up. He had trouble downloading them and he had work and I had work and pretty soon I dropped out of the IIGS world. Back then, I remember some people thought I was crazy for believing in the capabilities of the IIGS and those people were sure that once I became a PC user I would change my ways. Well, today I am a huge PC enthusiast. I have built several PCs from scratched and upgraded another heavily. PCs are fun and powerful and a joy to upgrade but what do I say about the IIGS now? The IIGS was a great machine and I still say so. ;-) But as a PC user, I can do even MORE for the IIGS. Now I have a CD burner in my PC so I was wondering, how many IIGS users would be interested in a CD-ROM compilation full of MP3s converted to IIGS format? Legal free MP3s, of course. If enough people are interested, as soon as I resurrect my IIGS, I can do a CD's worth of converted songs, burn them to an ISO9660 CD-ROM, and offer the disc for the price of the disc and shipping. Here's a copy of my original article in case anyone wants to do this on their own: Playing MP3 music on the Apple IIGS The Apple IIGS is a computer that's famous for doing what's commonly considered impossible. Years ago, they said there would never be workable fax software for the IIGS. The IIGS proved them wrong. Then they said there would never be multitasking on the IIGS. GNO/ME and The Manager proved they were wrong. They said the IIGS could never run TCP/IP. They were wrong. They said the IIGS could never run a web browser. They were wrong. The latest "impossibility" seems to be the playing of MP3 songs on the IIGS. This too is wrong. Yes, decompressing the MP3 songs on the IIGS would take unreasonably long, but playing the resulting digital audio is a piece of cake for the IIGS' Ensoniq 5503 sound chip. So put on your mission impossible caps, folks, and get ready to take your IIGS into the 21st century. The software that's needed on the PC side is Winamp and Goldwave. On the Apple IIGS side, you'll need Oversampler and a program to set file types and aux types (such as ProTERM or UtilityWorks). Fire up Winamp on the PC. The trick is to redirect the audio of Winamp from the speakers to a .wav file on your hard drive. Click on the menu icon in the upper left hand corner of the Winamp window and from the drop down menu select Options then Preferences. Under Plug-ins select Output and select and configure the Nullsoft Disk Writer plug- in to an output folder of your choice. This is where Winamp will drop your converted .wav files. Close the window. Now click on the Playlist (PL) button and load up the MP3s you want to convert. Then hit the play button. Winamp will convert each of your songs in real time (since the output is redirected to disk, you will not hear your songs through the speakers). After the last song has played, click the stop button so Winamp does not try to reconvert the first song on the play list. Close Winamp. There should be some HUGE .wav files in the output folder you selected. These will be reduced in size and processed for the IIGS using the Goldwave program. Although you can take the .wav files as is to the IIGS, the quality will not be optimum and you'll go crazy trying to move such huge files. Launch Goldwave and load one of the .wav files. Goldwave will load the file into memory. The first thing to keep in mind for outputing audio on the IIGS is the playback rate. The IIGS' audio system is on the motherboard and picks up noise from the switching power supply. This power supply operates at a frequency of 26360Hz. An audio file playing back at this rate, double this rate, or half this rate will be clean because the power supply will not interfere with the sound chip. It will be less clean at other playback rates. Go Effects menu and select Resample. Type 26360 in the Rate box and click Ok. Goldwave will resample the .wav at this sampling rate. The second thing to be aware of is that the IIGS sound chip has a different frequency response than most PC sound cards. It favors bass to treble. So, go to the Effects menu and select Filter, then Parametric EQ. What looks like a graphic equalizer appears. That's exactly what this is. Like the graphic equalizer of a stereo system, it is meant to adjust for the frequency response of different playback devices. For PC to IIGS transfers, you'll want to boost the treble (incidentally, if you sample something on the IIGS and convert it into a .wav for the PC with Goldwave, you'll want to dampen the treble with the Goldwave Parametric EQ otherwise the audio will come out rather sharp...so IIGS to PC transfers are OPPOSITELY equalized with respect to PC to IIGS transfers). Select band 5 and boost the Gain by five. Repeat with bands 6 through 10. When you are finished, click Ok. The file is now ready to be saved. Under the file menu, select Save As. Type in a file name or use the default if you do not want to keep the original Winamp generated file. For Type, select Wave. For File Attributes, select 8-bit, mono, unsigned. Repeat this process for each of the music files. You now have .wav files which are the MP3 songs converted for IIGS playback and they are only a little larger than the MP3 originals. The next step is to get them to the IIGS. Getting such large files over to the IIGS (several megabytes each) is best done with a Zip disk and Peter Watson's MUG! desk accessory. However, null modem or AppleTalk would also work. They take a lot longer, though. Once on a IIGS hard drive, the files are ready to be played with the Oversampler program. However, constantly setting the playback rate manually is a drag. Instead, let's set the file type and aux type so that Oversampler knows it is an audio file. Using ProTERM, UtilityWorks, or another program with file type/aux type setting ability, set file type as $D8 and aux type as $0200. This will turn your mystery file into a file instantly recognizable to GS/OS as an audio file and more importantly, Oversampler would be able to simply load and play the file. Before proceeding to the next step, now is a good time to borrow the amplified speakers from your PC and plug them into the IIGS' audio output jack. Just like on the PC, you would not want to listen to your MP3s through your PC speaker, would you? ;-) Fire up Oversampler and open one of your converted MP3 files. All the controls are preset, so just hit the Play button. Surprise, an MP3 song is playing on your IIGS! Oversampler spools the file as it is playing from disk so you do not need lots of memory to completely preload the song. If you can run GS/OS, you can usually get Oversampler to play just about any song. The only catch is the speed of the playback device. Since Oversampler is playing the song in real time, the drive needs to have a fast response time. A Zip disk is fast enough for for regular play as is any hard drive. AppleTalk volumes or floptical disks are not fast enough, however. One feature of Oversampler is, you guessed it, oversampling. You might have seen this feature in the advertising for your CD player. This feature works by INTERPOLATING the waveform of the digital audio. The file is doubled in size in memory and the plot points between two adjacent data points are generated as the average of the two. This smooths out playback. The resulting audio is played back at the oversampled rate. Oversampler supports two times and four times oversampling. As saved by Goldwave, the converted MP3s are 26360Hz. If Oversampler is set to two times Oversampling, it'll interpolate one set of data points, double the size of the audio file internally, and play it back at 52720Hz. Zip disks are fast enough for two times oversampling as is any hard drive. For four times oversampling (best playback quality 105440Hz) usually requires a fast hard disk drive and an Apple High Speed SCSI or a RamFAST card. Hard disk drives of this speed are usually 500MB or greater in size. Surprise a PC or Mac user by playing your converted MP3s on your IIGS to them. With only large hard disk drives available these days (1GB minimum) what ELSE are you going to do with all that space? Build a collection. Put the "S" back into the Apple IIGS!