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

[persia]

And thus you have it, you can't possibly beat today's PC or Mac but you can come close to a 1999 PC without destroying compatibility.  Given that this is retro-computing some might complain that that's not retro enough!

[biggun]

Karlos wrote:
IMHO, as a musician, I'd like to see the following things per channel for an enhanced Paula:

1) 8/16-bit sample depth support
2) 8-bit volume register
3) 8-bit pan register (-127 full left, 127 full right)
4) Optional interpolation for playback of sample data below the hardware mixing frequency.

If you can do that per-channel, then I'd like to see at least 16 of them :-)

1) 8/16-bit sample depth support
I agree, and this is included already.

2) 8-bit volume register
I agree, its also included.

3) 8-bit pan register (-127 full left, 127 full right)
I agree, that panning is useful.
Its certainly good to be able to put some voices in the center. But I feel that 8 bit panning volume is overkill and not needed for most cases. I would prefer have simpler HW  panning support for the majority of cases.
I think the question is how often to you need panning.
I think every song can make use of having a drum "in the middle" or "having the bass in the 1-part LEFT / 2 parts RIGHT position".
For the rare cases where you need 256 positions of panning "for the helicopter if circling around you effect" you can always use two channels and do the panning the normal ways over the volume.

4) Optional interpolation for playback of sample data below the hardware mixing frequency.
I fully agree. And the new Paula ie "Pamela" chip does HW oversampling of all samples automaticly.

I think it to make the HW support those feature that most songs will need.
If a rare case does needs something special, then its okay to use the software for this. Even the not upgraded Natami, is at least over 100 times faster than a classic A500.
Its okay to use the CPU from time to time.
But it would be nice if we could catch the majority of cases with HW support. E.g if 95% of the AHI music does play without CPU usage and if the majority of SDL games will play without CPU usage then this is great.

What is your opinion as musician:
How many HW channels are needed to play 90% of the mods?

Cheers
Gunnar

[yssing]

Not a Musician... But I would like to have some way of implementing Surround easily...

[A6000]

biggun wrote:
3) 8-bit pan register (-127 full left, 127 full right)
I agree, that panning is useful.
Its certainly good to be able to put some voices in the center. But I feel that 8 bit panning volume is overkill and not needed for most cases. I would prefer have simpler HW  panning support for the majority of cases.

What is your opinion as musician:

Cheers
Gunnar

I am not a musician, but I have several pieces of music where sound pans from one speaker to the other, the effect could not be achieved with only 4bit or less panning, so a musician who wants to move sound between speakers needs 8bit panning.
It would also be useful in games where the sound can come from the sound source on screen rather than from off screen.

Something that is far beyond your goal, would be the ability to positions sounds anywhere in 3d space using panning between 8 speakers.

[AmiDelf]

@BigGun

How about adding an DSP? Like the one used on DelfinaDSP? Other than that, I wonder what sort of audio output do you have? Will it be minijack or phono?


Take Care

[biggun]

I am not a musician, but ...

Only a musician should make statements like "xyz is needed for this and that in music".

We have discussed this before: On AMIGA it was always possible to make these panning effect using two channels (one left one right) and use the 6-bit volume to create panning effect.

It was mentioned before that AMIGA games used to use these effects. 6-bit volume was good enough for this effects on classic Amigas. Natami has 8-bit volume, so really enough bits for high quality panning.

We stated before that certain PC cards that provide panning use 4-bit resolution for this.

I think a panning for new channels is a useful addition to have sounds coming from center or middle-right center etc.
For "placing the instruments" on the stage 2-4 bits is more than enough. For high quality effects you can always allocate two channels getting 8-bit resolution.

My 2c

[Karlos]

All of my musical equipment has at least 7-bit resolution (often a lot higher) for volume and pan since that's the basic minimum standard required for General MIDI conformitiy.

FWIW, I agree with Piru that you should separate the traditional Paula model from the new one, providing the former as a wrapped interface to the latter.

When designing the 'Super' features, consider implementing features from the perspective of an API such as AHI as well as thinking about current and future module formats.

I seem to recall, AHI uses 16:16 fixed format for volume and pan, which is pretty high resolution indeed. Suddenly hardware 8-bit panning resolution doesn't sound that excessive any more. Ideally, SuperPaula would be able to accelerate a decent chunk of AHI functionality.


Going back to a purely musical view, if you could add tuneable low pass filters to each channel, I'd be very happy indeed :-)

[yssing]

Well, I might not be talented at creating music. But for coding games etc, it could be nice to have 5.1 sound. That is real 5.1 sound, not emulated. That was what I meant

So instead of "just" panning from left/right, you could also have the option of panning rear/front and left/right.

[sadddam]

very interesting thread!

i make music on amiga since 1994. i've started with protarcker (4ch, 8bit), later with prot.'s sceneversion, melontracker.
then i've got an a1200 and digibooster pro has came with real multichannel capatibilities. with a 68030/50 i was able to play and edit 8-10 channels in 14 bit modes, then 12-14 chs. with my later 68040/40. then i've bought a VSS soundcard with built in mp3 decoder, 24 bit sound - man, that was awesome after paula's fake-14bit modes... full 16 bit replay with 16-20 channels (well, 20 channel was a bit much for the 68040...).

you can hear some of my music made on the amiga1200 and VSS here:

http://pollen-records.uw.hu/tizev.html. point your browser to the "letoltes" link below the cover. 80% of this album has made on amiga.

im sure that for musicians the more channels are the better.
if you want to use some effects (digibooster pro has some basic dsp echo and delay effects fe.) in your song, a 060 surely not enuff for sw mixing 16< channels.... use as much hw channels as you can!

make it ahi compatible for digibooster and for the other audio softwares using ahi. maybe add a nice dsp for real time effects:) panning is important i guess, i know you can do it with 2 channels with volume, but still...

anyway, this project is great, too bad it's not 1998/99 anymore..... keep up the good work!

[bloodline]

Karlos wrote:
All of my musical equipment has at least 7-bit resolution (often a lot higher) for volume and pan since that's the basic minimum standard required for General MIDI conformitiy.

Just checked all my Audio software and hardware, and everything is 7 bit... -63 to 63... I guess that's the legacy of MIDI...

Going back to a purely musical view, if you could add tuneable low pass filters to each channel, I'd be very happy indeed :-)

12pole resonant (with Adjustable Q) low pass filters please :-) Some distortion effects might be easy to implement too...

While we're at it why not add a filter and amp envelope?

[AeroMan]

What about if instead of just one volume register for each channel, use two registes? One for left and other for right.

This would satisfy panning and volume with a good resolution without complicating the hardware, and would eliminate the need for two channels to do the "helicopter" effect

[polardark]

I agree that 7 bit resolution for panning and 7 bit resolution for volume should be a minimum requirement. Dynamic panning is very good to have and gives the musician more freedom.

If you say that dynamic panning is not needed, you're in effect imposing a limit on the type of music that you think should be made using your device. Electronic music in particular will use panning in more complex ways and it's very common to have a synth sweep panning from left to right. Listen to Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene IV for instance. Dynamic panning is important

As far as polyphony goes, 8 voices is probably the lowest that any modern musician is going to feel comfortable with although 16 voices would arguably be even better.

The Paula has a seldom used "oscillator sync" feature where you sacrifice one voice to control the sample index pointer or amplitude of another voice. This could be used for vibrato or tremolo and possibly even a few simple synthesizer functions like phase modulation and ring modulation. Any chance of implementing this in the SuperPAULA?

[biggun]

AmiDelf wrote:

How about adding an DSP? Like the one used on DelfinaDSP? Other than that, I wonder what sort of audio output do you have? Will it be minijack or phono?

Take Care

A good example of a System using a DSP was the ATARI Falcon.

At the time of the Falcon, adding a DSP made sense.
The Falcon main CPU was quite slow, the 030 of the Falcon was just slightly bit faster than a stock Amiga 1200.

The situation is now different.
The NATAMI 060 is at least 10 times faster than the Falcon. The Natami can do those effects with its 68k, which at the time of the Falcon were only possible because of the DSP.


There is not that much value of adding a DSP just for Audio effects to the AMIGA.

But having a general purpose DSP with like ALTIVEC features  could make sense. Such a general DSP could be used to various tasks ranging from MP3 audio decoding, to DVD playback, or acting as Texturemap shader.
We are evaluating these options.

Cheers
Gunnar

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:

Karlos wrote:
All of my musical equipment has at least 7-bit resolution (often a lot higher) for volume and pan since that's the basic minimum standard required for General MIDI conformitiy.

Just checked all my Audio software and hardware, and everything is 7 bit... -63 to 63... I guess that's the legacy of MIDI...

[/quote]

You'll probably find there are ways to send 14-bit data as MSB/LSB pairs. The GM requirement is that you can send a 7-bit value which depending on the parameter is treat as signed or not. On some of my kit, these 7-bit parameters are regarded as 'course' controls and have separate RPN messages to set the 7-bit fraction LSB 'fine' control.

Some controllers are capable of directly interpreting a 14-bit successive byte-pair value. IIRC, pitch bend is one of them.

Going back to a purely musical view, if you could add tuneable low pass filters to each channel, I'd be very happy indeed :-)

12pole resonant (with Adjustable Q) low pass filters please :-) Some distortion effects might be easy to implement too...

While we're at it why not add a filter and amp envelope?

Well, provided you have registers for the basic controllers I don't think there's much harm in letting the CPU do envelope control :-)

[Karlos]

AeroMan wrote:
What about if instead of just one volume register for each channel, use two registes? One for left and other for right.

That isn't really any different to having an equal resolution volume/pan pair. The advantage of volume and pan is that it's a friendlier interface.

As a musician you usually want to adjust a given part's volume or stereo location. Having separate left and right volume controls implies that you always need to modify both in order to adjust either property.

You might as well make the hardware support it rather than force the software layer to translate pan/volume into a pair of left/right volume values.

[Rob]

But having a general purpose DSP with like ALTIVEC features could make sense. Such a general DSP could be used to various tasks ranging from MP3 audio decoding, to DVD playback, or acting as Texturemap shader.We are evaluating these options.

Hardware assisted audio/video would certainly be a nice feature for those wanting only to run an Amiga system.