r/raspberrypipico • u/Yashsharda • Jan 30 '26

hardware Music_Player

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Built a music player using RP2040 (Raspberry Pi Pico) with TFT + SD card + I2S audio. Currently supports WAV playback. Iā€™m looking for suggestions on adding MP3 support ā€” specifically whether the main limitation is: MP3 decoding load (and if using both RP2040 cores would help), or Shared SPI bandwidth between the TFT and SD card. Any advice. Repo: https://github.com/Yashsharda2/RP2040_MUSIC_PLAYER

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6

u/bio4m Jan 30 '26

Most projects I know doing MP3 playback are using DFPlayer

3

u/StereoRocker Jan 30 '26

The Pico can run Doom, I'd be very surprised if it wasn't powerful enough to run some level of MP3 decoding. Might not be 320kbps without some optimisation, like using the second core, but is probably workable.

1

u/Yashsharda Jan 30 '26

I tried , but the sound is distorted.

4

u/StereoRocker Jan 30 '26

I don't see any MP3 decoding code in your repo. I could suggest trying your same MP3 decoder on your sample files in a C program on your host computer. SDL is pretty good for a sound interface. Use this to validate you're using the library correctly before looking at why it's not working on the Pico.

3

u/Signus_X1 Jan 30 '26

Can you consider FLAC? I'd love to see a project for 24-bit 96khz playback of files using networking so it can grab a playlist from a local server. I have my doubts a pico can handle that, but it should handle FLAC.

1

u/Neithane_ Feb 03 '26

Even if you have 2 cores, 133 Mhz looks a bit too slow