Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Anyone know of a low cost hardware MP3 decoder??
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nali:
I know this is a dying breed but would like to find a decoder IC to let me play a stream from a MCU. This is a commercial product so needs to be "suitable for new designs". Interface can be SPI or I2S or even UART.

VLSI have a series of devices but they are *expensive* and probably overkill as I just need a basic mono speech playback. Digikey shows a few other parts but I have the choice of "Discontinued", "Obsolete", or "Not for new designs"  :(

I do have a working solution playing WAV audio with a DAC but would like to move to MP3 if possible both to cut down file sizes, and the files originate as MP3 so I need to convert them (this is an online mobile device and the files are generated & downloaded on demand)

janoc:
The Ogg Vorbis page has a list of vendors making hardware decoders:

https://wiki.xiph.org/index.php?title=Vorbis_Hardware&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop

It is Ogg format, not MP3, though some may decode MP3 too. Just keep in mind that  you better budget big $$$ for the requisite patent licenses if you want to use MP3. MPEG consortium loves to sue companies for this.
nali:
That's interesting and food for thought! I hadn't really considered that MPEG licencing was such a thing nowadays especially considering that open source has cracked it (ffmpeg etc) and the proliferation of dirt cheap MP3 players you can buy for less than the cost of a pizza. That probably explains the cost of the VLSI product.

Actually OGG is an option... the files are actually text-to-speech from Amazon Polly which supports both so I'll look through the vendors on the page you linked, so thanks for that.
greenpossum:
MP3 patents expired in 2017.
Someone:

--- Quote from: nali on May 08, 2020, 09:55:04 am ---That's interesting and food for thought! I hadn't really considered that MPEG licencing was such a thing nowadays especially considering that open source has cracked it (ffmpeg etc) and the proliferation of dirt cheap MP3 players you can buy for less than the cost of a pizza.
--- End quote ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing,_ownership,_and_legislation
Open source solutions are available and legal.
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