[vorbis-dev] ogg player on a clie

[Ben Collins-Sussman]

Hi folks, I've been talking with Jack in IRC (mainly in the subversion
channel), but he suggested that I pose my vorbis questions here, to
the community of experts.

I own a Sony Clie PDA, which is a PalmOS-4 device.  Sony wasn't
patient enough to wait for PalmOS-5, which has a standardized sound
API and a new CPU powerful enough to decode audio.  Instead, they just
stuck a proprietary, dedicated DSP in their palm device and included
proprietary mp3 playback software.  The mp3 playback sounds really
good (coming out of the stereo headphone jack) so I know the DSP
should be capable of decoding ogg as well.

If you visit the AeroPlayer FAQ, they claim that the Sony Clie DSP API
is unreleased, and thus not supported.  But it looks like Sony *did*
recently release a library and API.  I downloaded it this afternoon,
and was pretty disappointed.  It only allows your application to play
a proprietary ADPCM block of data:  

<p>   The Pa1Lib library can play MIDI and ADPCM data.

    * MIDI: SMF 0
    * ADPCM: Yamaha ADPCM
          o should not contain a RIFF header
          o 4 KHz or 8 KHz sampling rate
          o single channel (mono)

   The Yamaha ADPCM format is not compatible with IMA ADPCM or with
   Microsoft ADPCM. A third-party Yamaha ADPCM encoder and its source
   code are included with this document (wav2adpcm), provided under
   the GNU General Public License.

My fantasy is to use this library with tremor, and be able to play
oggs.  But this library looks like a joke.  8khz?  Mono?  What the
heck is that?  Maybe this is a hobbled-down API they've released,
rather than the real thing?  I also assume that tremor just wants to
spew bits directly at a DSP, not generate a complete adpcm block.
(The sony API just 'pulls' data from an existing adpcm block.)

Has anyone looked at this stuff?  Are others already out there,
accomplishing this task?  Is this Sony API completely useless?

Please keep me cc'd, as I'm not subscribed.  I'd love to hear other
opinions about the situation.

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