Very simple music player for the Game Boy Advance. Currently supports only one file per ROM and is missing many features (see TODO). It uses minimal battery power.
Audio is uncompressed PCM. Quality is fixed at 8-bit 32,768Hz stereo. This is (I think) the highest quality audio possible on the GBA, and it sounds better than you'd expect.
- Skip forward/back
- Multiple tracks
- Support other frequencies, mono audio
- Album art
Use make to build. You will need devkitPro. The Makefile uses my "inline alias" preprocessor script for assembly files, which requires Python 3.
The GBA plays 8-bit audio. Converting audio to 8-bit will produce artifacts for any music, but they will be especially noticeable for songs with a large dynamic range. Quiet sounds become fuzzy and distorted. Make sure your audio files are amplified as much as possible before converting them.
Time limit for each audio file is 8.5 minutes.
You will first need to convert your audio files to raw, signed 8-bit 32768Hz stereo PCM audio. You can use the batchconvert.sh script for this (requires ffmpeg). It will convert MP3 files in the current directory to .raw files. You can modify the script to search for different extensions.
If a .raw file is larger than 32 MB, it is too large to store in a ROM.
Then run the buildcarts.py script in the same directory as your .raw files as well as gbamp.gba. This will produce a .gba ROM file for each audio file.
Launch the ROM and the audio should start playing immediately.
The screen is normally blanked to save power. Hold Start to show the elapsed time.
While holding Start:
- Press A to pause/play
- Press B to stop and exit to the main menu of your flash cart (Visoly, EZ-FLASH, or Super Card). This also happens automatically when the song is complete.
- Press L to restart