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Comment by pornel | Hacker News Reader

Off-loads sample mixing to the sound card. Computers of that era were slow enough that doing 44100 additions per second was expensive (IIRC quake had 8Khz samples anyway).

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Something that always seems to surprise me when I remember it today: Playing an MP3 on my Pentium CPU in 1996 worked, but it _really_ brought the system to its knees. I could choose between listening to MP3 music or interacting with some other program (mIRC, Netscape, etc) but certainly not both.

That probably had more to do with decompression than sound mixing though, right?

Decompression in conjunction with primitive multi-tasking on MacOS and Windows. That remained an issue until Windows XP.

(Very small groups of) people used be in awe at LAN parties when I showed them how Linux could play an MP3 without stutters while copying large files across the network and browsing images.

Then it was time to play games and people were less impressed by me not being able to join any other game than Quake...

> Decompression in conjunction with primitive multi-tasking on MacOS and Windows. That remained an issue until Windows XP.

No problems here on Winamped Windows 98, albeit on a Pentium 166 with MMX. Often enough it was just a systems configuration issue.

Winamp was perfectly fine by itself as I recall it. Even on a P100 without MMX which was what I rocked around 96-97. But as soon as you did anything else that involved any kind of IO, there would be skips and stutters.

Odd. I distinctly remember listening to music via Winamp, and updating my tsv-databases, while copying downloaded data (mostly e-books and music) from the local uni's internet saved to Zip 100 disks (and later Zip 250s on a Pentium II). Same for the ubiquitous LAN parties. One thing to add is that the read and written data were completely sequestered (i. e. on different drives); an early safety practice that became a habit a long time ago.

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