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

[Piru]

- The DMA of two channels could be combined to read both the sample and the volume values in for one channel.
- Doing this Paula could DMA create 2 channels with 14 bit.

This is not how the 14bit audio works.

It works by playing the high 8bits with full volume, and the lower bits with volume 1 on the other channel.

Octamed showed that its relative cheap to virtuelle increase the number of channels by mixing channels with the CPU.

Actually octamed 8-channel mode was quite horrible (lots of limitations) and very CPU hungry. AFAIK it didn't use similar channel mixing to sp3m and AHI.

Whatever you do, preferably totally separate the new modes from the old audio registers. The best solution would be to allow old and new audio to co-exist, this way you can have old apps using audio.device or direct hw register banging after allocating the channels, and new apps using the high definition audio thru AHI. AHI supports 24- and 32-bit precision with 7+1 channels.

[Piru]

The point I was trying to make: Octamed is particularly bad example. sp3m was the first app to really show what can be done with real channel mixing.

[Piru]

But do you think any user will run two music applications old/new at the same time?

Yes. It'd be really cool to be able to use old apps such as protracker, delitracker (the native noteplayers) or HippoPlayer, without rendering the new audio unusable. Since the old audio would be independent (with it's own volume) it could nicely co-exist with the new AHI controlled audio.

Think of it like having external soundcard in your amiga, only integrated.

Can you tell us what feature might be helpful to run AHI/SDL sounds with low CPU usage?

I'd take a look at some AHI driver, preferably one with 24bit support. AHI source

[Piru]

I'm somewhat puzzled... if these new channels, new panning features, repeat/looping etc are meant for mods, who's going to write the new trackers and replay routines? Further, what will convince any tracker musician to create mods using this specific tracker program / mod format?

IMO it still would be smarter to keep the old audio hw as-is (wrapped to use the new HW obviously) and add the new stuff as common audio hw, with high quality audio output (say 8/16/24bit, 11/22/44/48 kHz, mono, stereo, 5+1, 7+1).

New trackers can use the HW thru AHI (OctaMed SS, DigiBooster, HivelyTracker etc).

If the old audio HW wrapper stuff is implemented too, you can use older trackers such as noisetracker, soundtracker, protracker and so on.

[Piru]

nowadays that Mac is pretty much obsolete since all that software functionality can be done better on a PC.

Macs use exact the same common audio components as PCs.

Also, today's PCs also seem to have a mixer of analog signals as well since the CDROM-audio can be mixed with the wave audio at various volume levels.

I don't know which decade you're living on, cd-rom audio hasn't been analog for years (the analog audio cable isn't even connected).

[Piru]

it's a 1Ghz Dell running Windows 3.11

Ouch. This is not "today's PC".

Regardless, even 1GHz system (running proper OS) can mix at least 128 simultanous audio sources together without any trouble. You're most certainly not limited to a single wave.