OctaMED Sound Studio Install Issues & Advice.

[Karlos]

Awesome, you know, think I understand the synth editor now and made my 1st synth script this past weekend, I'll try and share that, it is a pretty cool and underated feature of OSS.

If you want to play with realtime synthesis, you must give MusicLineEditor a go.

[Karlos]

@Karlos

Really great tunes. The second two sound very professional and I'm amazed that you got some of those sounds from Amigas.

I was quite pleased with the first one myself. Getting a proper tone generator to sound like a specific old 4-channel mod only without the hard panning and dubious fidelity was no small task

[Karlos]

Trust you to get a perverse pleasure from that! )

Actually, it started out as an experiment. 4-channel mod files have a particular feel that is as much of a product of their 4-channel limitation as it is anything to do with Paula's non-linear 8-bit and other sample-specific issues. A good 4 channel mod always seems to give the impression of something more complicated, rapidly switching between instrument sounds on the same channel, use of chord samples and so on. Once you recognise how they are sequenced, you notice these effects in the music.

With a normal musical instrument, you don't have those limitations and end up just building music with layers of sound. I thought it might be interesting to apply the mod style approach and the most obvious way to do that was to try and recreate something. That tune originally started as a MIDI remake on my old FM keyboard after I'd been playing the game for a touch of nostalgia. When I got my current tone gen, I dug out the OctaMED project and reworked it for that.

-edit-

Good old youtube. Just found the original music: here...

[Karlos]

I can't check it just now (at work) but to render this to a 16-bit track, all you need to do is choose "Disk 16-bit" as your mixer output. After selecting this, increase the mixing frequency to 44100Hz and you might also want to increase the mix buffer to a larger amount (say 4096 or so). You might also want to enable the smoothing option here, but beware it can make your track sound very dull if you are using low fidelity samples to start with. It also takes much longer to render.

Then hit play. A progress window will open as your track is rendered and the various player windows update as usual (only slower if your CPU power is insufficient) so you can see which block/line it is up to.

A note of caution, it will keep rendering indefinitely or until you manually stop it if your song doesn't have a stop instruction at the end somewhere.

[Karlos]

Thankx again Karlos! Your a well spring of information.

Stop Instruction, that's another thing I used to know but forget. What command do I use for that again?

I can't remember off the top of my head for sure, but I think it's 0FFE. It's in the online help under player commands anyway.

[Karlos]

As for the 0FFe command, that just makes my Amiga lock up and reboot.  Nice trick!

It stopped the song though, didn't it? :lol:

I'll have a look later. I'm sure that was the correct player command though.

[Karlos]

That it did.

So is that a bug, or a just a cruel joke the programmer threw in there?

No, really, FFE is the stop instruction (just confirmed). It should be "right justified" in the column, eg:

--- 00FFE

If I was aware of a bug that would reset it without warning for invoking a command, I'd certainly not tell you to do it, you could lose your work. That'd make me a complete douche

Is this a repeatable bug or do you only get it in a particular set of circumstances?

[Karlos]

That's how I typed it in, and yes it manages to crash my A1200 and WinUAE just the same.

Does it make any difference what mode you are using? Mix mode v 4 channel mode etc?

It works fine on my A1200 and A1. Haven't installed in UAE yet to try it there.

[Karlos]

That's how I typed it in, and yes it manages to crash my A1200 and WinUAE just the same.

I can't reproduce this bug in E-UAE here. I am wondering if your executable is the same as mine.

Mine is exactly 256192 bytes (no embedded version string) and has the following md5 sum (would be handy if you can calculate yours for comparison) : dc33b9c7285bbc7c6dce7ed7f44678d3

[Karlos]

@Karlos:  

Great diagrams!  What'd you use to make them?

My cameraphone, Gimp and Dia

Although, in the end that isn't my A1200T, I couldn't get a decent shot of it, what with the A1 sat on top and everything

Also, where can a guy find this "MIDI In" program?  It isn't from Jack Deckard's aminet:mus/midi/MIDITools.lha package is it?

Here: http://aminet.net/package/mus/midi/midiIn32

[Karlos]

http://aminet.net/package/mus/midi/midiIn32

Having just loaded it up again, I realise it doesn't do AHI, rather an upcoming version was supposed to. Nevertheless, it will happily do 48kHz 14-bit calibrated stereo (using the same output engine that AHI's 14-bit paula mode does) on my 040. You need to be using a scan-doubled (dblpal/dblntsc) or RTG display mode for that to work though.

Just fired it up for an action shot:


click for gallery entry

[Karlos]

Checked it out under winuae. Looks like a bug in SS. You trigger the bug by selecting a channel mode 5 - 8 channels. 4 channel and 1-64 should be alright. Now select a track >= 5. Winuae crashes. :hammer:

Edit: did some research on my a1200. Same result. Crash....

x303

Hmmm. I always use channel 0 for that. That's probably why I've never encountered it

[Karlos]

Well, in the many years i've used SS, i never encountered this bug before. :afro:

Neither have I. Ever since getting OctaMED SS, I've made little to no use of the old 5-8 channel mode. All the old OctaMED modules I had written that did use them got reworked for Mix mode, which is just so much better. Every channel having it's own volume and pan was nice enough, but being able to use stereo samples (best played a centre-panned channel, of course) was just the icing on the cake for me.

Since getting the MU100R, which has AD inputs (that can be assigned to midi channels for volume/pan/effect control etc), I've found I've gone back to using 4 channel mode more frequently, since I tend to use samples less frequently and when I do, the effect processing of the tone gen is more than enough to make up for the limitation of the 4 channel mode.

[Karlos]

You know, all this might have been better off done in the music maker's social group. It's a shame that feature isn't used more. Oh well.

[Karlos]

Here's my latest work in progress. I intend to add in some of OctaMED's effects and what not in time as I re-learn those things I've forgotten.

Now how would I go about saving this into a 16-Bit wav on my Amiga?

Right, I just got around to downloading this and having a peek. You appear to be using the "8-channel" mode. What I suspect you wanted to use was the 1-64channel mixing mode, with 8 channels set in the mixing preferences.

Then you don't have to halve the volume of all your samples (which reduces their resolution by 1 bit) and you can use higher mixing rates.

A second suggestion is that rather than setting the volume of the sample in the sample editor, store every sample at the loudest amplitude possible (without clipping) and set a default volume in the instrument properties instead. The reason for doing this is that when the sample is permanently scaled in volume in the sample editor, you lose precision (whenever you make it quieter at least). The mixing routines take the raw sample value and scale it by the current instument/channel/note volume using a greater resolution than your starting 8-bit sample.

[Karlos]

@XDelusion

I've uploaded a 10 channel mix-mode octamed track for you to pull to bits, maybe it will help highlight a few tricks for mix mode: here...

It's basically a quick and dirty recreation of the opening theme to the game "Breathless", which I had just gotten the demo of at the time.

So, it uses 10 channels at a mixing rate of 28149 Hz (on PAL, on NTSC you might find it adjusts it slightly higher). Only 8-bit mono samples are used, so your 030 shouldn't have any problems whatsoever. If memory serves, I wrote it on a lower spec machine than that, or at least something comparable at the time.

The blocks contain 12 tracks but I never bothered using more than 10 channels, they were just handy for temporary places to copy/past sections.