Andy Lo A Foe wrote:

I'm writing a player (http://www.alsaplayer.org) and currently use mpg123 for mp3 decoding purposes. I'm interested in adopting MAD because it is fully reentrant (right?). My question, is there sample accurate seeking possible in MAD?

[You'll need to subscribe to mad-dev before you can post another message, but to answer your question...]

Yes, libmad should be fully reentrant; all decoding state is held in the three primary structs, mad_stream, mad_frame, and mad_synth.

Sample-accurate seeking is *possible* with MAD, but that doesn't mean MAD goes out of its way to make it easy. It is essentially up to you to provide all seeking functionality. You provide MAD with the byte stream buffer to decode. If the buffer you provide happens to correspond with the part of the stream you wish to seek to, then voila, you have implemented a seek.

MAD helps you by marking the frame boundaries in the stream after decoding each frame header (stream.this_frame and stream.next_frame). For seeking forward, you can decode the frame headers only (mad_header_decode()) and resume with a full decode once you reach the time or sample position you're interested in. For seeking backward, you can recall the desired frame's stream position and resume decoding from there.

Actually, things are slightly more complicated than that due to various frame interdependencies. As I explained previously on this list (check the archives for another seek question), to avoid any unpleasant burps in the audio after a seek, it is necessary to decode a few frames *before* the frame you wish to obtain audio from in order to re-sync the decoder. It is also a good idea to perform synthesis on the frame immediately before the frame you wish to obtain audio from, although you can throw away the output.

How many samples does each frame produce?

48000 24000 12000 44100 22050 11025 32000 Hz 16000 Hz 8000 Hz (MPEG-1) (MPEG-2) (MPEG 2.5)

Layer I 384 384 384 Layer II 1152 1152 1152 Layer III 1152 576 576

This number can also be derived as 32 * MAD_NSBSAMPLES(&frame.header) or, after synthesis, synth.pcm.length.

To help you calculate time positions, you may find MAD's timer interface helpful. See:

http://www.mars.org/mailman/public/mad-dev/2001-May/000244.html

Hope this helps.