Re: RFS: splay -- Sound player for MPEG-1,2 layer 1,2,3

[John Hedges <john@drystone.co.uk>]

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 05:51:25PM +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> On 2004-07-06 John Hedges <john@drystone.co.uk> wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 02:45:17PM +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> > > On 2004-07-06 John Hedges <john@drystone.co.uk> wrote:
> > > > I'd like to adopt splay, a command line mp3 player. I've updated the bug
> > > > report (#246971) to reflect ITA but have a couple of questions before
> > > > uploading.
> > > [...]
>  
> > > I have not used and tested it but have just looked at package
> > > description and website. How does splay differ from mpg321?
> 
> > splay is the fastest mp3 decoder I know of, using about one third the cpu
> > required by mpg123 (based on woody packages).
> 
> I see.
> 
> You are mixing up mpg123 and mpg321 BTW. The former is fast and
> non-free, the latter is slow (libmad, no FPU) and free. To make it
> easy to mix this up /usr/bin/mpg123 is managed by dpkg-alternative,
> i.e. invoking mpg123 will start mpg321 if installed.
> 
> > I just tried mplayer so now know of a faster one :)
> 
> mplayer's MP3 decoder mp3lib is based on mpglib which is a part of
> mpg123. While mpg123 is nonfree, its mp3-decoding engine is not.
> (xmms also uses it.) Sadly I do not know a free commandline mp3-player
> in Debian based on mpglib.
> 
> > This makes splay more suitable than mpg123 when decoding to files or
> > when using slower hardware. Mainly I use epia based MiniITX as mp3
> > players, but the tests below are on a P4:
> 
> >     john@desk:~$ time mpg123 -s 1.mp3 > /dev/null 2>&1
> 
> >     real    0m6.278s
> >     user    0m6.260s
> >     sys     0m0.000s
> 
> I bet this slow "mpg123" is a mpg321. ;-)
>                   cu andreas

Quite right - I did use mpg321 but wasn't aware of the distinction. I
remember reading of licensing problems resulting in mpg321 but had no
idea it was based on an entirely different decoder.

However it might be that the splay decoder is comparable to that of
mp3lib. My quick and not so reliable tests showed it to be about 15%
slower but that was comparing a stock i386 splay with an optimised i686
mplayer.

I'm more than happy with splay and have used it for years. Well worth a
sponsor - I'm sure you'll agree ;)

Cheers

John