Trackers that do 14-bit sound on 68000?

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And these will run on a stock 68000?  I ask because I have OctaMed SS 1.03 and it says it needs a 68020.

HD-Rec is a pro-level DAW - where did you get the info that it would run on a stock 7MHz 68000?

How much work are you prepared to do? I think you might just get four channel audio, with a bit of work.

Take your 16bit samples and split them into two 8bit samples, one containing the high order byte, the other the low order byte.

Fire up OctaMed, one of the older versions (5 I think supports the 68000), and put it in to 8Channel mode.

Now work out the channel pairs (4 Channels left, 4 channels right).

Set 2 of the left channels volume to 1, and 2 of the Right channels to 1.

Now when you load in your samples (2 for each sound, high bytes and low bytes), pair them up in the tracker with the low order bytes in the channels with a volume of 1 and the high order bytes in the normal volume channel (makes sure they are on the same side of the stereo image...

That should work... Not tried it though.

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A simple, "No" would have been fine :lol:

You are quite right, I was just thinking though a possible way to make it work... Other than the way I suggested, you would have to write your own tracker

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Yeah, those guys have better ears than me.

Perhaps not better ears, but probably actively looking for a distinctive quality that can be found in Paula's audio reproduction...

Her hardware does colour the audio quite a bit, and I like to use her for 8bit sample play back (though I prefer record the audio samples on my Mac with it's 24bit FireWire audio box, to ensure a clean recording).

All the old Samplers were quite distinctive, which is why I still use my Roland W-30 for all 12bit work

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Thanks for the replies,

I am actually quite up to snuff on the more *advanced* sound / music-recording aspects on expanded big-box Amigas, as for many years I had a big-box Amiga with AHI compatible 16-bit sound card, 68040, oodles of RAM etc. etc. and used it for MIDI and audio editing work. BUT during that time I did little work with Paula audio or trackers on low-end Amigas, so am a little rusty in that regard, hence my original question.

For the high-quality (i.e. 16 and 24 bit CD-quality work) I've since moved onto PC DAWs as the hardware is far cheaper, faster, and the quality of the software is much better (for DAW work, only, I must emphasize ).  I use Reaper, for instance.  I had spent many years expanding my big box Amiga so that little of the audio work I was doing on it actually used the original motherboard hardware, instead relying on third party CPU cards and AHI audio cards, etc. So I don't see the switch to PC DAWs as a move away from Amigas, as I had essentially already moved away from the hardware that made the Amiga unique when still using my Amiga.

I have decided that when I do audio composing on an Amiga, I am going to go "purely Amiga"; using only the motherboard native chipset and stock 68000 processor.  So while my big box Amiga is gone, I have kept a low-end Amiga (an A500 with Hard-drive side-car and a bit of expanded RAM) as my "pure" Amiga audio workstation.  I figure that if I'm going to use an Amiga - I might as well go for the full experience and use what makes that machine unique - i.e. Paula audio for that distinctive sound, and trackers.  Otherwise, what's the point?

So, thanks for the clarification on 14-bit audio with a stock 680000 system. It seems that a stock A500 cannot do 14-bit audio.  No problem.  Like I said, I want to hear that Paula sound, anyway.

Now, to expand the question.  Were there any trackers that could handle more than 4 channels of audio and would still work on an Amiga 500?

I have found Oktalyzer, but I wonder if there were any more.  

I am most familiar with OctaMED SS 1.03, which would handle more than four channesl, but I was running that on my 68040 A2000. I have read that version of OctaMED needs a 68020.

OctaMED 5 I think was the last preSound Studio version of OctaMED and ran fine on my A500.

A word of warning though, 8 channel mode isn't very nice... I would recommend sticking with 4 channel mode and doing overdubs if you need more channels

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It would have been even nicer if it supported 16-bit in the first place Or at least support 16-bit output with 8-bit delta encoded input (which can sound very good and would have been affordable in terms of memory use).

Would that have worked? If you have a particularly loud transient, that would exceed the sample delta, unless you have a very high sample rate... Which would eat up memory :-/ no matter how you look at it, if you want better than 8bit audio, it's going to cost a lot of memory...

Ahhh, just thought a bit more... You mean Paula would accept an encoded bitstream, so the loud transients would still be 16bit, but the rest of the stream would be 8bit deltas... Yeah that would have totally rocked... Basically HAM for audio