But MAS3587 from Micronas IS a DSP. In fact it is a an mp3 encoder/decoder.



Apart from the compression stage, I can't see why the rest is a difficult work for an 8-bit microcontroller. There are many mp3 players from hobbyists that use an 8-bit micro (no matter if it is 8051, AVR or PIC) that does tasks such as reading data and controlling FAT32 filesystem plus additional I/O (LCD, matrix keyboard, the DSP, etc.)

I believe that Philip M Gallo pointed the right way to go: It 's not the word width, but the amount of memory is going to be needed as a buffer. A simple 8051 (if we are talking about 8051 family) as we all know can address up to 64Kbytes of external static RAM. If we go to derivatives such as the Philips P89C669 (Philips's 51MX architecture) the limit is 8Mbytes. A good idea would be to use SDRAM, but then you need a CPLD/FPGA as an SDRAM controller if you work with an 8-bit micro... The question is what Mohammad really needs for his project. I do not know if in such a design you would have to use a buffer or write directly to the hard disk...

Personally, for such a project, I would use an ARM processor with integrated SDRAM controller. A good example is PP5002 with ARM7TDMI core plus other features such as integrated EIDE controller, I2C, USB 1.1 , real time mp3 and wma encoding/decoding (plus some other audio formats that I don 't remember right now), etc. Apple's iPod uses PP5002. Go to http://www.portalplayer.com/ for more info...

Only one question to Mohammad: How are you going to build an 8 channel voice recorder with a single MAS3587? As far as I remember MAS3587 has an input for a microphone, a stereo A/D input for other sources (e.g. radio chip, tape recorder, etc.) and 2 S/PDIF inputs for digital audio signals. Except if you are going to use 8 MAS3587...

George