SuperPAULA - if you have experinece in amiga music please give feedback

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I agree that 7 bit resolution for panning and 7 bit resolution for volume should be a minimum requirement. Dynamic panning is very good to have and gives the musician more freedom.

If you say that dynamic panning is not needed, you're in effect imposing a limit on the type of music that you think should be made using your device. Electronic music in particular will use panning in more complex ways and it's very common to have a synth sweep panning from left to right. Listen to Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene IV for instance. Dynamic panning is important

As far as polyphony goes, 8 voices is probably the lowest that any modern musician is going to feel comfortable with although 16 voices would arguably be even better.

The Paula has a seldom used "oscillator sync" feature where you sacrifice one voice to control the sample index pointer or amplitude of another voice. This could be used for vibrato or tremolo and possibly even a few simple synthesizer functions like phase modulation and ring modulation. Any chance of implementing this in the SuperPAULA?

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Dennis wrote:
I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but the period registers can be improved by making them "phase" registers that are added to a phase-accumulator.

Phase accumulators will decrease sound quality and introduce aliasing into the sound. On the SID you get away with this because the sample rate is very high (around 1 MHz?). In this case the sample rate mentioned is 96 KHz which doesn't seem enough.

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Karlos wrote:
As a musician, one of the things I use paula for is her dirty, heavily-aliased sound when playing back samples. Additionally, the non-linear sample value->amplitude is rather nice.

The Amiga doesn't alias. It does have frequency mirroring though, which is a much more pleasant and harmonic and can still sound very raw. A lot of Amiga musicians took this into account and sampled their sounds at a note frequency relative to the sampling frequency to minimize non-harmonic distortion.

With 192 KHz sampling frequency (which, i guess, could be thought of as 4x oversampling) you won't have much audible aliasing even without interpolation.

I agree that being able to select between an interpolated and a non-interpolated sample playback mode for each channel would be very useful.

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Cheeeky wrote:
sp/dif or optical out should be a serious consideration.

S/PDIF might reduce the sound quality since the most common implementations are not capable of 192 kHz sample rate. One option might be hardware resampling although this would most likely increase the hardware complexity and/or quality.

If professional musical use is a goal then ADAT Lightpipe is a more sensible direction to go in than S/PDIF since it supports many channels and/or sample rates up to 192 kHz. Then again, considering the limitations compared to modern electronic music equipment on the market, there are no reasons to use the SuperPAULA for professional audio unless it ends up having something very unique to offer.

Either way, personally i see few reasons to justify implementing S/PDIF.