[sdiy] Freescale Soundbuite

[Eric Brombaugh]

On Feb 3, 2008, at 6:20 PM, Johannes Öberg wrote:

> Wasn't really thinking of a sampler, but a synth with looped (but long
> as in multicycle) samples for waveforms, like the Korg DSS-1. So it
> would need all the usual "virtual analog" features, and preferably
> internal FX. Isn't a dedicated DSP faster for that?

Yes.

> And why are people using the Spartan 3E instead of the 3A, the latter
> supposed to be optimized for DSP instead of logic? Btw, can't find
> that Spartan based sampler on the google, have a URL?

Because the Spartan 3e Starter kit development board is very  
inexpensive and has a lot of useful peripherals. It was one of the  
first dev-boards out a few years ago that was truly hobbyist friendly  
so a lot of folks jumped on board when it first showed up. The Spartan  
3A development boards are newer and somewhat more expensive. Aside  
from the nifty DSP48 slices, there's not a lot of reason to upgrade.

The sampler project was done by Rick Huang and he published it on his  
own website here:

http://member.newsguy.com/~rhuang/FPGA/WideBus-Recorder.zip

> What attracted me to the SoundBite is that's it seems like a
> ready-to-go dev board for audio, with many I/O:s and no FPGA/hardware
> learning curve as I'm already somewhat familiar with the 56k DSPs and
> assembler programming. I get the feeling that doing something FPGA
> based takes considerably more skill.

If you're not familiar with hardware design then FPGAs will require  
some study to use effectively. But adding external RAM to a DSP56K is  
also going to take some doing. Depends on where you want to invest  
your time.

> BTW, that's 88k-words as in 88k x 24 bits isn't it?

Yes.

Eric