Trackers that do 14-bit sound on 68000?

[Ral-Clan]

Hi, are there any music trackers that will output 14-bit audio, and also run on a 68000 processor Amiga?

[Ral-Clan]

OctaMED Sound Studio.

DigiBooster.

HD-Rec

There are more, but I don't remember them all.

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?

[Ral-Clan]

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 channels, but I was running that on my 68040 A2000. I have read that version of OctaMED needs a 68020.

[Ral-Clan]

I never thought of it like that before. :-)

The last "semi-serious" audio work (i.e. recording some demo songs) I did on an Amiga was with HD-Rec on the A1 about eight years ago, before switching to Logic on the Mac, which is still my main DAW. I was using an SBLive sound card, on a G4 PPC, with a MIDI i/f that Alfred Faust made for me, so I suppose I had moved away from "Amiga" hardware too.

Having said that, I recently put a new CMOS in my several-years-dead-A1 to get it going again and last night downloaded the latest version of HD-Rec.

Haven't done anything with it yet, right enough.

I guess I was always trying to make my A2000 more and more like all the fantastic PC and Mac DAWs I saw around me.  After about the year 2000 this became an uphill battle. I was trying to accomplish this by buying more and more (expensive) hardware additions that eventually led to a system that was touchy, difficult to maintain and relied less and less on the actual Commodore hardware at the machine's heart (RTG graphics and RTG audio avoided using the custom chipset altogether).

But while my 68040 CPU card was nice, it was never going to be able to run any of the Amiga DAW packages (like Audio Evolution or HD-Rec).  Purchasing an expensive, hard to find, second hand PPC card only to achieve a basic DAW level that a Pentium I from the 1990s could achieve at a fraction of the price was not a practical solution.

My machine's maxed-out 32MB of RAM was never even going to be able to edit a three minute song in stereo CD-quality WAV without resorting to Virtual Memory (which was very slow).  I did manage this way for many years, but four minutes to load a song and minutes to execute every edit was bearable, but not desirable.

I did use this system until 2008, though, when yet another hardware failure eventually made me realize the lengths I would have to go to to get the thing working again.

I realized that I was trying to make the Amiga 2000 what it was not.  I was trying to turn it into the equivalent of a modern PC DAW, which it couldn't be.

I've come to the realization that I had been trying to shore up the Amiga's weaknesses, when instead I should have been concentrating on what it does well - i.e. using its custom chips to full advantage and the great body of audio and tracker software that allowed musicians in the 1980s and 1990s to squeeze so much out of the stock Amiga architecture.

So that's my thinking behind setting up an A500 workstation.  8-bit parallel port sampling, trackers, DPaint for making animations to go with the music, etc.  These are all things the A500 can do well.  The goal is to work within, and celebrate, the machine's limits and unique abilities instead of trying to make it compete with a Modern DAW.  Leave the DAW work for the PC, leave the fun 8-bit work for the Amiga.

[Ral-Clan]

I'd tend to go along with this. You could maybe argue that the method of working was unique to the Amiga but not really the sound.

Well, some argue that the Paula's non-linear output gives it a distinctive sound, but you'd have to ask more knowledgeable people about that.  I think Bloodline, for instance,  might have more knowledge in that respect.

[Ral-Clan]

You can hear the difference if you save the .mp3 out as a sound sample.  Pick your fave sample out of the song... like a 3 second sample.  Cut it out and save it as its own separate sample.  Listen to it on its own.  It will sound like crap.  I have experienced this myself many times.

How would this work? An MP3 uncompressed to a WAV should sound exactly the same as an MP3 being uncompressed on the fly.  The should be bit for bit identical.

[Ral-Clan]

It is bit for bit identical.  That is the point.  And it "sounds" perfect.

Now cut a piece out.

Listen to the piece by itself.

It will sound like crap.  All kinds of weird distortion.

When you remove the illusion the distortion becomes obvious to anyone.  Its weird.

Sorry, but I don't follow your argument.  MP3 encoding is a lossy encoding format, i.e the frequencies that are removed are done so at the encoding stage.  When you listen to an MP3 or de-encode one to a WAV, they should be identical.  i.e. you cannot "get back" lost frequencies by un-encoding an MP3 back to a WAV.

A 3-second sound clip of an MP3 or the same 3-second clip of this mp3 converted back to a WAV should sound identical.

Granted, an mp3 is always inferior to the ORIGINAL master wav, but the two 3-second test clips both derived post-encoding process should sound the same.

[Ral-Clan]

I thought he meant take a 3 second clip from a 320 kbps mp3 and compare it to the same 3 seconds clipped from a 16 bit wav?

I don't know, he would have to write his original explanation a little more clearly.  Maybe I misunderstood.

[Ral-Clan]

So....just from a hypothetical perspective then, does a stock 68000 even have the horsepower to do 14-bit audio?

I seem to recall seeing a demo a few months ago posted here on A.org (link to YouTube video) where an A500 was playing an uncompressed WAV off a hard-drive in 14-bit audio.