> It only has 32MB of RAM so I doubt you could get any music running on it.

Get off my lawn. With 8MB of RAM you could run Win95 AND a MP3 player.

A standard mp3 runs about 1MB per minute. You should really only have to buffer a couple seconds if you're streaming. If you try to keep a 4 second buffer your going to be somewhere between 40 and 70kb (this thing also has an SD card so you could keep a much shorter buffer if it was local.)

It really doesn't take much else, you'd need a tcp stack where most of the memory usage is buffers. Maybe 15-30 kb, and you'd need to load some player into mem as well.

There are tiny embedded devices all over that have music running on them. I've seen lightbulbs and light switches that can stream music.

Idk why everyone thinks it takes 500mb to play an MP3. Maybe because the vast majority of compute power these days seems to go to all the shit the app puls in to sell ads and native programs are all just electron apps but it really doesn't have to be like that for most functions of a computer.

I played MP3 files in realtime on my old Pentium 75 with 16MB of RAM with plenty of CPU and memory to spare. This thing is way more powerful than you need for simple music playback. Getting audio out however may be a challenge, maybe USB speakers?

MP3 already made such a PC sweat though. I doubt it could play 256 kbit AAC, and forget about HE-AAC or FLAC.

This chip is clocked over 7 times higher than my old Pentium, and it's not like the Pentium was massively super scaler. I'm not sure how the IPC compares, but I can't imagine that ARM is that much worse than a mid-90s Intel chip.

FLAC would be easier, maybe. But at minimum it should be played on a MMX Pentium.

I always figured “Multi-Media eXtension” is just a marketing fluff but 20 years later here we are.

I doubt it has the memory capacity or bandwidth for a lossless format like FLAC.

Pentium 2 + 32MB of RAM should be enough.

What? I played music perfecly on 16MB and an ARMv5 musl build of Linux+Busybox and mocp.

ZRAM did magic expanding the RAM to 24MB.

And under text mode you can do lots of things. With a framebuffer, say hello to 420p videos, PDF's and some web pages with images thanks to links -g.

You must use tmux+ash as your "interface", but it works.

I'm old so I'll just say that my Amiga 500 had 512KB of RAM, and it played really cool music!

You had 512KB? I had 64KB. If the machine booted to BASIC, it had exactly 28815 bytes free.

I could play music. Not waveforms, but MIDI-level.

An MSX machine?

Bluetooth:

- Direct file transfer between devices, with simplicity not comparable to wifi.

- Easy connection to the internet using a mobile phone (likely even the cheapest feature phone).

- Connecting a mouse (and maybe an external keyboard).

- Connecting a 2FA security token (may be important in the SSH terminal capacity).

IIRC many of the cheap mass-produced WiFi chips tend to just do BT as well in the same chip.

iPod had 32MB RAM and mostly for cache...