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State of the art (for Windows) in 1998 was… you will never guess… “Windows 98”! I know 3 years doesn’t sound like much but Moore’s law was VERY much in effect at that time. I know your laptop isn’t that old because WindowsXP was released in 2001. My memory of 20 years ago agrees with Bryan’s. “Take a computer from twenty years ago, and you’ll be lucky if it can play an MP3 in real-time.” The results - except for the cat sample - sound great. All of this is controlled over MIDI and played through a cheap speaker. has a video demo of the Noise Nugget set up in sampler mode, where it can play a lute-ish sample and a cat sound. So, with all that processing power, what can the Noise Nugget actually do? Well, first of all, it’s a sampler. With this, you’ve got a digital synthesizer with a MIDI interface, audio effects for guitar pedal tomfoolery, an audio effect trigger board for playing pre-recorded sounds, a digital recorder, and a USB sound interface. There’s connectivity in the form of USB, two audio outs, one audio in, I2C, UART, and GPIOs. The microcontroller in question is an ARM Cortex-M4 running at 180MHz, with a quality DAC. It’s called the Noise Nugget, and it’s just what you need when you want to put audio in anything. For his entry to the Hackaday Prize, is capitalizing on this power to create a Swiss Army knife of audio synthesis. This means, of course, that microcontrollers can do audio very, very well. Now, computers can handle hundreds of tracks of CD-quality audio, and microcontrollers are several times more powerful than a desktop computer of the mid-90s. Take a computer from twenty years ago, and you’ll be lucky if it can play an MP3 in real-time. Thirty years ago, we would be lucky if a computer could play audio.