
Building a Spotify Player for My Mac SE/30 - laurentdc
https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/55998-building-a-spotify-player-for-my-mac-se30/
======
fencepost
This is interesting, but I'd call it more "using a Mac SE/30 to display what A
Spotify client/player is playing."

I was curious about whether a SE/30 was actually able to keep up with decoding
modern mp3 streams - I seem to recall newer processors than those running
under significant load in the early days of Winamp.

Edit for relevance:
[https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2672/why-...](https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/2672/why-
does-mp3-audio-decoding-overwhelm-retro-cpus)

~~~
pavlov
Decoding MP3 requires about 24 MIPS on a DSP at minimum. On a general purpose
CPU, a 66MHz 486 or 68040 can just about do it at quality. The Mac SE is
nowhere close.

~~~
tomc1985
IIRC on a 486 DX/66 running Windows 95 you had to set Winamp to decode at half
quality in order for playback to not skip (on a 128kbps file)

~~~
einr
Yes, the fastest 486 systems could just _barely_ do full-quality 44.1/16 MP3
decoding (DX4/100, etc) Even then a DOS player was a better bet than Winamp.

A SE/30 would be absolutely screwed.

~~~
walrus01
As a comparison a basic home theatre pc these days with ryzen 1500x cpu, and
GeForce 1030 fanless with GPU accelerated hevc in the video drivers, can
decode up to about 350Mbps bitrate of HEVC 2160p 60fps using the latest VLC
build. Beyond that it starts dropping frames.

edit: tests run using sample videos from here, if anyone wants to see what
bitrate of 4K they can play back before it starts losing frames.

[http://jell.yfish.us/](http://jell.yfish.us/)

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flocial
The title doesn't do the post justice. This is an amazing use of a vintage
Macintosh and the technical details are quite interesting.

~~~
Fnoord
Its an awesome demo, but if you pay your own electricity bill old hardware
such as this just isn't practical. At least not in my country with our energy
prices.

~~~
wazoox
The SE/30 power supply is only 100W, so it doesn't burn that much.

~~~
rocky1138
You're both right, but i see his/her point since I also have to pay my own
electricity bill. A Raspberry Pi or similiar hardware will do this at an order
of magnitude cheaper. Still, for romance reasons, I much prefer the solution
in the article. Sometimes it's just worth the extra small bit of money for the
romance

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spongeb00b
It’s built on Retro68, a gcc based cross-compiler for building classic Mac
apps on modern machines:
[https://github.com/autc04/Retro68](https://github.com/autc04/Retro68)

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dschuler
This is so cool. I mean, I would've futzed around with HyperCard for 100 hours
before getting half of this to work. Good job!

For all the posters that are going on about MP3 decoding, yes, we remember how
decoding MP3s used to take up 80% of our Pentium 120 CPU cycles. Until MMX
came along. Those dancing fab engineers saved our CPU cycles. Anyway, who
knows how Ogg Vorbis would've decoded from Spotify back then - probably not
well!

The major advances since then have been out-of-order instruction execution and
SIMD instructions (although we still don't have general vector processors, as
Hennessy & Patterson still lament in the 5th edition).

(My mother used to tell me I was getting a 486 instead of a Pentium 66 when I
bas being a brat.. the terror it used to strike in me! unreal.)

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npunt
The creator of this (ants) also made a classic Mac wifi extension which is
also a brilliant little backport of modern wifi selection UI.

[https://github.com/antscode/MacWifi](https://github.com/antscode/MacWifi)

------
Rjevski
I’m more impressed by having WiFi on such a Mac rather than the Spotify client
itself.

~~~
justusthane
If you didn't see it, here's his walkthrough of how he did the wi-fi. Very
cool!

[https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/31078-adding-
wi-f...](https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/31078-adding-wi-fi-to-my-
mac-se30/)

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bl4ckneon
Practical? Hell no

Coolest thing I've seen in a while? Hell ya!

Good job on this, this is some awesome functional art!

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King-Aaron
I'd love to have this in my living room as the primary stereo, just for the
aesthetic quality.

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pasbesoin
I'm afraid to start mine up without re-capping it. But, I don't know much
about that. Any relevant tips?

With regard to OP, workaround for the "hug of death":

[https://web.archive.org/web/20181219174629/https://68kmla.or...](https://web.archive.org/web/20181219174629/https://68kmla.org/forums/index.php?/topic/55998-building-
a-spotify-player-for-my-mac-se30/)

P.S. I should probably also re-cap my Kaypro 2x. If the drives will even still
work; what does one do about the belts and such in those? And what does one
lubricate their rails and friction points with?

Sorry if this is too OT, but I figure this kind of story may attract people
who know these things.

Finally, this coming year, I may be moving to a place that gives me space and
energy to take on these hobby projects.

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8bitsrule
"The speaker itself streams and plays the music, and the Mac simply tells the
speaker which song to play...."

I was unaware that you could now get speakers with that kind of horsepower
built-in. What's their typical use-case?

~~~
latchkey
Expensive, but looks like they do a lot:
[https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/speaker_systems...](https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/speaker_systems/nx-n500/)

~~~
pingiun
You could also use a chromecast audio, which should work with spotify:
[https://www.spotify.com/en/chromecastaudio/](https://www.spotify.com/en/chromecastaudio/)

~~~
tracker1
It does... also got a google home mini that I use with it (was bundled in with
something else I was buying). The voice recognition seems to be a bit better
with Alexa though.

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dotdi
I don't remember the last time I was this impressed by a post on HN.

Bravo!

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alex_suzuki
This is absolutely amazing. I‘m extremely impressed with the engineering
behind this, especially the details like the OAuth bridge or the WiFi adapter.

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pocketstar
Just pulled my Mac SE out of storage. Great to see what the little machine can
still do!

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muterad_murilax
Why is the video muted?

~~~
clever-cleaver
Copyright.

~~~
fabricexpert
Smart. I was just about to go out and buy a CD and then I saw this YT video, I
was thinking great! Now I can listen to Phil Collins for free!

Then I realised there was no audio. So I went and purchased the CD and now I
realise how immoral it would have been to watch this video without paying the
artist's record label their fees. Phew

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ianlevesque
Super cool! I’m a little surprised nobody has backported a TLS implementation
though.

~~~
mrpippy
I'm personally maintaining mbed TLS for classic Mac (68k included) for use in
a libssh2-powered SSH client (an update of MacSSH). It works well on PPC, but
I haven't benchmarked it on a 68k Mac yet. Without any optimized assembly, I
fear it might be really slow.

[https://github.com/bslabs/mbedtls/tree/macos](https://github.com/bslabs/mbedtls/tree/macos)

~~~
ianlevesque
Oh cool, I knew there had to be one. The Spotify responses should be pretty
small other than the images, so unless the handshake was really expensive it
might be ok (small key sizes?)

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InGodsName
Amazon's music player has no ability to download music to your pc.

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ngcc_hk
Just watching civil war and wonder why Spider-Man collect a mac/se. Can it be
used today? Here it goes.

