Hello, I want to design a microprocessor board which will be capable of playing up-to 16 audio streams simultaneously. The audio streams will be stored in flash or SD card as WAV files. Does someone knows if how I can do it? Thanks, Ersin
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#2218352
Ok, sounds easy. As long as you decide to play back 8 bit sounds with 8 khz sampling frequency. :)
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#2218354
sd card lib: elm-chan.org/docs/mmc/mmc_e.html
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#2218364
Your problem will be the data transfer rate of the sd-card. With the libs from elm chan you will get maybe 300 kb /sec. As long as you read only one file, and have big buffers (sector size) on the mc. So reading 16 files simultaneously from one sd-card doesn't work! Believe me. What to do? -multiple sd-card / flash drives -avoid overhead / fragmentation from fat -> create your one stream file system. A little calculation what the transfer rate should reach: 16 bit, 32 mono channels (16 stereo channels) * 44100 khz bit depth channels sampling frequency =22.579.200 = ca. 22 Mb / sec :)
Thanks for the answers. It will be 48 Khz, 16 bits. Audio stream has no compression. SD or flash storage is not a problem. I have difficulties in audio electronic part. Thanks Ersin
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#2218419
What difficulties? Audio output (audio dac circuit), mixing, controlling all that stuff?
My problem is mainly mixing two or more audio streams. I will have one microprocessor and an FPGA available on the board. I will mix the audio streams either digitally in the FPGA or by using multi ADCs and an analog circuit to mix them. In either way I don't know exactly how to do it.
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#2218444
Are you Ersin Oezalp from BARAN Microelectronic GmbH?
Yes, do we know each other
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#2218470
With an fpga, that is another challenge: You need to setup a microblaze core or something to controll all that stuff. Then access the sd-card / flash drives from that core. Big tasks! Digital mixing algo. for unsigned 16 bit values: A + B – A·B / 65536
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#2218472
Sorry Z = A + B – A·B / 65536 A = sample 1 B = sample 2 Z = mixed sample
Seems complicated for an FPGA but can be done. Do you know how I can to it with 16 DACs (I have to mix 16 streams).
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#2218549
16 dacs, forget about it - or find somebody who route this beast for you... Mixing analog signals is very easy. Just use an op, insert an adjustable resistor in the feedback loop to control sum gain. Each channel needs an poti to to controll the channel volume like here: http://yusynth.net/Modular/EN/MIXER/Mixer-1U.html It is build on a breadboard in minutes... greetz jonas
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#2218555
With the dacs, do you plan using some of the "new" DACs more or less with an codec used and clock frequence = fs * 256 or some of the old 16 bitters....?
Jonas, thank you very much for the analog circuit. It helped me a lot. I think I have to use 16 DACs since I have 16 digital audio streams. Is this correct? But I didn't decide yet which DAC to use.
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#2218647
No thanks! I like to help. :) >I think I have to use 16 DACs since I have 16 digital audio streams. Is >this correct? But I didn't decide yet which DAC to use. This is correct. As long as you don't use a dac with multiple channels. But let us go ahead (we assume to use an easy to handle one like this Rohm BU9480F, here the link: http://elm-chan.org/works/pcmp/report.html): You need to avoid (oh it is really challenging me to explain this in english) bad ground loops in your circuit, and that is not all... I think you need to read a few hints to designing a good dac layout with 16 dacs. Maybe you are lucky and some of the masters reign this forum can give you some more information. I stay on...
What about this chip from TI: http://focus.ti.com/docs/prod/folders/print/pcm1602a.html It has 6 DACs. I have to use 3 parallel to achive 16 channels. Actually I am an experienced PCB and hardware designer. The problem is that this is my first audio project. I developed mostly industrial control electronics. I will investigate more on filtering and routing audio signals. Thanks a lot.