Firstly, just how power-hungry is the Crusoe anyway? I thought it was 1 watt at standard operation? What's the stats on the StrongARM in comparison?

Secondly, the way I understood the MP3 format was that the spectrum graph (i.e. what the FFT produces) was pretty much available with minimal transformation from the actual MPEG information. If that was available, surely a lot of the frequency data could be used in the visualisations with little cost? Can someone who knows more about the actual format tell me whether this is wrong or right?

Incidentally, I see someone has come up with a way to do FFT-like operations using a very small number of multiplies and shifts; it works something like ten to fifty times faster than the best FFT algorithm and is only marginally more inaccurate (the best is something like 8.92Db vs 8.86Db THD or something). I don't know the link, but it was mentioned on Slashdot.

Who knows what these scientists can come up with?

Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.