Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Cambridge, UK
Posts: 3

Hi all,

I'd like to buy an MP3 player or voice recorder for the Visor. I'd also love to use that device for GENERAL audio input/output.
-->I'm wondering if others are interested in the following audio features and/or know if these features can/will be implemented.<--

1. I'd want the ability to output from Palm OS programs through stereo headphones (and to bypass the built-in speaker). It's clear that the MP3 files had better do this, but I'm wondering if there are Palm OS constraints that would stop stereo headphone output from other Palm OS programs.
I'd want stereo because it is more enveloping (in games, in audio tools, and instruments) and I'd want to do fun stereo audio tricks (e.g., the binaural beat).

2. I'd want a microphone input _jack_ (preferably with _stereo_ capability). This would be especially nice for voice recording. With this, you could position a microphone in front of your mouth to improve the signal to noise ratio and improve the convenience (say, while carrying the visor in your pocket). It would also allow me to use different (better?) microphones than the one provided with the Visor.

3. I'd want to have a variety of different "fidelity" levels (and therefore different memory usage per second) for recording and playback. Some times I'd want to record/hear high quality stereo and other times I'd just need lo-fi input/output.

4. I'd might also want to output audio from the springboard device through the Visor speaker.
Among other things, it would be neat to use the Visor as a foreign language phrase book, BUT with audio output. You'd search for the phrase on screen in English and it would output the phrase in French (or Mandarin or Tibetan or whatever). Instead of messing up
the pronunciation, the phrase would be pronounced for you. Or instead of pointing to the translated phrase, you could play it (especially, helpful in countries with low literacy rates). (This would be one
feature where low-fidelity output would be ideal so you could store a large audio database.)

Note, I don't have a Visor, yet, nor have I written code for Palm OS devices, so forgive my related ignorance.

That's my 2 cents in 400 words (0.005 cents per word).

stoph

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: New York, NY USA
Posts: 25

Ooooooooh. We must be soul mates.
One for me, too, please?

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Atlanta, GA, USA
Posts: 56

Keep in mind that you only have 8 megs of ram in the visor to deal with. Stereo doubles your ram usage. Remember that at CD quality sound (stereo 16 bit 44.1kHz), you eat up a meg with 6 seconds of sound. Even with a 100 meg springboard, that's 600 seconds, or 10 minutes. Not much time for big bucks in memory.

Registered: Oct 1999
Location: Newark, De. USA
Posts: 5

Don't forget either that if someone was to develope a springboard with on the fly MP3 encoding (i know someone makes a chip that can do this) then the audio, in stereo with cd quality, it about 1 MB a minute. For voice recording, I take it down to 22.1 khz, 64 bit, and this is about 500 KB a minute.
I might just look into the developement myself...