OctaMed sound studio

[Karlos]

Hi i am very pleased i managed to load guitar,piano, drums, and base ,and play a bit of a tune, and the Amiga sounds really good ,i have the settings on fast ram, which is good,not sure how many tracks i can use , thankyou again

The number of tracks you can use simultaneously depends on how fast your CPU is. Of course, what you can do is create something using a lowish mixing rate and when it's ready, render it to disk at CD quality (or better).

A basic 14MHz 020 with fast ram should be enough to use 8 channels at ~22kHz 14-bit stereo quite comfortably in realtime.

Whatever you do, though, don't turn on smoothing until you want to render to disk. The interpolation used is pretty slow and applied to each channel individually. When I accidentally tried it on a 16-channel tune on my 040, I had to hold both mouse buttons for a while to stop the playback.

[Karlos]

Anyone got any links to 8bit DnB/Breakbeat/House sample packs?

I don't fancy converting decades of 16 and 24 bit samples unless I really have to.

No need, really. OctaMED SS will happily load 16-bit samples, though there are some restrictions on their playback compared to 8-bit ones.

[Karlos]

Me no likes SS, Octamed Pro V4 is much nicer.

I guess we'll have to differ on that one. I've nothing against older versions of OctaMED, but for me V6 and subsequently SS represented a shift from the "regular" tracker to a proper application. When I went RTG, seeing my first 32-channel mixmode track (and more importantly being able to edit it) in a 1600x1200 display was a revelation.

[Karlos]

That's what Logic and Ableton are for!

No, they're for girls. OctaMED SS is a proper tracker, but designed for grown-ups.

[Karlos]

No such thing as a "proper" tracker, they are all just kids toys.

Nah, kids toys are things like Garage Band, where any halfwit can string tunes together with minimal effort. I'm not saying a talented musician can't create a decent track in it, but it's aimed at the "instant gratification" generation.

A tracker, any tracker, requires patience to work with. In some respects, it's like an instrument in it's own right, insofar as it takes a significant amount of practise and learning it's nuances to get decent results out of. Of course that analogy breaks down when you consider that it's not an instrument you can play a live performance on.

In short, you need at least some talent to use one.

[Karlos]

Can you trigger OctaMED (or even MED) via MIDI?

Yes. Not used it in a while, but it was useful back when I'd use two machines each in 4 channel mode, to make sure they started simultaneously and kept in sync.

However, if you just want multitimbral sample playback over MIDI on your amiga, then MIDIIn is the tool for you.

[Karlos]

V4 seems the lesser of two evils as it doesn't try to be something it's not: Cubase/Notator.

OctaMED SS doesn't try to be anything other than OctaMED 6 with more channels to play with and some internal support for 3rd party sound cards. It's not remotely like Cubase/Notator, not sure where you got that from :-?

[Karlos]

well Octamed 4 has the synth built in and SS does not...

Yes it does. You just pick an instrument slot, then in the main control window, set the instrument type to "synthetic" then click the "edit..." button and the synth editor opens up and you can carry on as before.

also menu layouts are very diff from my readings of Octa 4 tutorials..

This is true. The whole user interface is quite different, but having used v6 before SS, this was not an issue.

[Karlos]

Well it tries to be a pro-audio sequencer rather than just a tracker.

I can see nothing whatsoever in common with what you have there *shrug*

I've used it since it was just MED. Octamed SS's interface is a natural evolution from v4:

If you look at v4, it's an oldskool tracker interface (which is fine, I grew up with it).

http://xmp.sourceforge.net/gallery/octamed-4.00.png

If you look at v5.04, you'll see that it's almost the same except that it's been reworked in GadTools. That has resulted in a lot of repositioning of the controls, but fundamentally it's the same:

http://donbuche.com/sites/all/imatges_web/octamed5.jpg

OctaMED 6 simply took this to it's logical conclusion, separating related sets of controls and putting them into their own windows that can be repositioned on the screen to wherever the user wishes.

OctaMED SS GUI did not change from v6, except to add a few new windows pertinent to it's new mix-mode playback.

The notation editor that appeared in OctaMED was (IIRC) removed by the time SS came out since nobody used it and nobody missed it. It remains, and always was, a tracker. Just because it destroyed the 4 channel limit and shrugged off all the limitations of it's old 5-8 channel modes didn't change the way you create music with it.

[Karlos]

Can you lock it to 4 channels only (no mixing?).  I want the original non-mixed sound.

Sure, that's the default setting anyway (unless you change it).

[Karlos]

Nope...  still there  

Maybe it was v6 it disappeared in then :lol: I definitely remember it going at some point. In any case, I don't have the required font any more, so I can't use it regardless. Not that I ever did

[Karlos]

As an aside, if you like synthsounds and trackers, do give MusicLineEditor a go. It's not quite protracker style, but it can make some very nice sounds.

It basically uses very short waveforms (not quite chip tune, but close) which can be fed through various effects (phase, filter, etc) and is capable of some quite remarkable sounds on a basic 020+ class amiga.

It will also do 8 channels, but you need a faster CPU then.

[Karlos]

So is the synth editor in 4 more fully featured than the one in OctaMED S.S.?

The Synthsound engine in OMSS is basically identical as far as I know. It certainly plays all the old sounds I have in my collection, except that you can use them in mix mode too, opening up a few additional possibilities, like greater polyphony.

[Karlos]

Actually, OctaMED SS is a bit of an Achilles heel for UAE. No amount of fiddling around with UAE's settings can get rid of the lag between pressing a key and hearing the sound; something no genuine amiga suffers from.

Of course, when it comes to basic playback of a completed track, it (understandably) performs very well, particularly on many-channel modules.

[Karlos]

Even with the Maestrix redirecting the audio through AHI?

Might be worth speaking to Toni Wilen about it to see if it's fixable or not.

Not tried proper WinUAE with host-native AHI drivers for some time, so I can't say for sure, but it always seemed like the issue was more to do with the host audio latency than anything. I guess that from the host perspective, UAE is just another application that presents itself as a stream source to be buffered and mixed into the final output. That will always add delay.