OctaMed sound studio

[minator]

the mags were called AM/FM ,and loads of issues with brilliant reading

Have a look at the Total Irrelevance disks as well, they were by the MED users group.

[minator]

Hi Matey,lucky you ,but i am begining to find more samples,and having loads of fun, so amazed at what my Amega 1200 can do ,i have the sound coming out of my creative decoder ddts-100 which can seperate the sound,or so they tell me,i have three speakers set up and another two that i am going to add shortly,and it is such a good sound ,and my friend who i had the Amiga off ,heard it and was stunned ,i did tell him he is not having it back lol,best wishes Brian

I used to play around with music on the Amiga, never made any mods though.
I play around with samples a lot, so much so that I eventually sold a couple of Audio apps.  They're both free now, you can get them here (scroll down the the Amiga section):

http://blachford.info/blachtech/index.html

Be warned though, if you get into sample processing it can take up hours and hours and hours...

I've recently got back into music and oddly enough I was also playing around with samples this weekend for the first time in a very, very long time!  Not on the Amiga though, I've been playing with a synth/sampler I got off ebay ...with 200 floppies of samples!

I'm also planning to start writing an app again but for the iPad this time, though it will be based in part on one of the Amiga apps.

[minator]

Any chance you could put the TI and MUG discs on-line somewhere?  I've never been able to find them anywhere.

[minator]

I never did start writing the iPad app (BTW it was to be based on the Aural Synthetica sound engine).  I did do a lot of research and started learning Objective C though.

As part of the research I downloaded a load of iPad synths, some of which are very good.  As I played with them I got more and more interested in the playing of the synths rather than coding them.  I've since set up a home studio and plan to start recording - once I've got my head around a few multi-hundred page manuals!

It's amazing what you can get now.  In my PC days I used to look at the capabilities of different sound cards but now I don't even need one.  I just got a mixer that has a firewire port, I just plug in and import directly from the mixer.

[minator]

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

[minator]

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

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

[minator]

I remember that. Good old non-linear Paula

The other effect you need to emulate properly to get that unique Amiga sound is the sample-rate aliasing, which might be slightly trickier to get right. I've always thought that ringing sound it adds to things played at low playback rates sounds a bit like what you'd get via an aural exciter.

PC sound cards work by hardware mixing the sound to a fixed output rate (44KHz or whatever).  The Amiga was unusual in that it worked by speeding up and slowing down the individual samples.  This means the aliasing noise changes with the pitch the sample is played at and thus becomes part of the sound.

Mixing players may inadvertently recreate this if they are not smoothed but it's likely to be a slightly different effect.


To recreate this effect could prove challenging. It needs to be done in the sample playback routine. You'd really need to create a a virtual instrument to do it properly.




OTOH you could just use an Amiga.
...which is exactly why I was asking about software that does 8-bit non-mixed sound.

[minator]

I think it's a bit different. IIRC, and I might be wrong about this, it isn't that it plays samples at different rates (ie, higher values for faster rates), but instead uses a sample period (physical duration between sample changes) to define the playback speed. This is a reciprocal quantity with respect to frequency - hence lower period values result in faster playback and vice versa. I'm a bit hazy on the details now but I seem to recall that these periods are expressed in a "ticks" of a clock that's derived from the system clock and runs at around 3.5MHz.

Well, that's what I mean. Your description is the technical description of how it actually works.  But the end result is the samples are not played at a fixed frequency.

This means that arbitrary playback rates aren't possible - the "tuning" of higher notes gradually becomes less precise than lower ones since the period value becomes smaller (thus having fewer bits of precision).

There have to be some interesting slew and phase effects resulting from this method of playback that are hard to reproduce in a conventional mixer.

Yup.

It also means (non-smoothed) mixer based playback will also have errors, just different ones.