were there hardware decoders for other formats as well? is such a device a full on sound card as well?

The second card was made by MicroLee in 1999, aptly named the ".mp3 AUDIO BOARD":

It needed atleast a 386SX 16MHz, 640K of RAM and DOS 5.x and supported all bit rates from 8K to 384K including VBR.

A second version of the software was made in 2002 to control 2 cards in one computer, in rder for DJs to mix mp3 files:

Official website:
-first version https://web.archive.org/web/19991013095423/ht … miclee/mp3.html
-2nd version https://web.archive.org/web/20020809012635/ht … h.com/mp3a.html

A test of the 2 cards was made by the canadian-french mag Micro-Info, you can find the video at http://micro.info/video/mi101299.rm
Not in English, obviously!

Have fun searching for one of those cards, and if you manage to find one, test it, report back and post high quality pictures, thanks!

mrau wrote:

were there hardware decoders for other formats as well? is such a device a full on sound card as well?

No idea about your first question, sorry.
Those 2 cards can also decode mp2 audio stream and playback audio CDs according to their specs, that's all.

why would such a card have such high cpu demands? even RAM demand is high imho

mrau wrote:

why would such a card have such high cpu demands? even RAM demand is high imho

You seem to be severely overestimating the processing power of a 27 year old CPU and its ability to pump data around uninterrupted while also managing a multi-threaded host operating system.

Any idea how much these might have cost in the late 90's? I suppose people still running 486's or slower Pentiums in the early Napster days might have grabbed one if the price was right.

On the consumer side in that era it's barely a bother. The mainstream 486-era was long over in the US by the itme Napster rolled around. People were content with their WinAMP 😀

also encoding is supported and recording ?

feipoa wrote:

Any idea how much these might have cost in the late 90's? I suppose people still running 486's or slower Pentiums in the early Napster days might have grabbed one if the price was right.

I guess the reason they are so incredibly rare is that at the time they were released they were incredibly niche products which means low production runs that likely made the price prohibitively expensive for most people that could have benefited from the product. Add to that that even 486 can decode mp3 in software if that is all they do, I think the number of people actively considering these boards would have been rather limited.

Add to that the fact that at that time MP3 was just starting to become known, let alone popular outside of your stereotypical geek circles most people wouldn't even have known about those cards and those who did likely already had hardware powerful enough not to be bothered much by mp3 decoding where this would have been nothing more than a cool toy to play around with.

So I recon the people who would have bought them didn't need them and those who could have used them didn't know about them and likely would not have been able to afford them.

Something like this might have sold if it came out a few years earlier and was integrated into an MPEG1 video decoder board.

The MPEG II audio format has a long history of use in radio and TV broadcasting, going back to the early 1990s. I assume cards like this would have been used by professionals in those fields.

I was using an AMD Am5x86-133 without L2 cache until late December 1998. I already had a substantial MP3 collection, but I had to down-sample my mp3s, otherwise the computer was unusable with other tasks. If I had heard of one of these cards before Dec. 1998, and the price was right, I would probably have purchased one. I was pretty opposed to getting a new system, so this product would have really excited me. If in the $100-$200 range, I'd have been sold.

Sorry to bump this.. but there are some ISA MP3 audio decoder cards on Ebay right now for cheap.. I just grabbed one. It is the first time in years I've seen them come up, as I have several search alerts set. They appear to be a clone of the NSM.. looks nearly identical. I purchased one, so hopefully it works with the NSM software. I'll document my findings here once I get it.

That is a cool find, can't wait for your update on it!

You sure those are for MP3's, and if so, what sample rates can it decode? Do you have the drivers and documentation?

Read the thread from the start, the NSM card is in the first post.

wiretap, did you ask the seller if he had software or papers along with the card? And thanks for the link, it was cheap indeed.

mrau wrote on 2016-06-16, 22:01:

why would such a card have such high cpu demands? even RAM demand is high imho

I suspect these requirements are because the windows drivers need protected mode. So a 32-bit CPU with 4MB would more or less be the minimum usable configuration.

How do I find them on ebay?

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-10-21, 02:47:

How do I find them on ebay?

You don't. They all gone. There were only two units. We will need to let someone else do the testing, preferably on a slow system in DOS, Win3.1, W95, and I hope NT 3.51 and NT 4.0.