Amiga audio early lead lost..

[haywirepc]

4 tracks 8 bit.... Mod heaven for a time, but the world moved on...

Why no answer even to sb 8 bit, that did 32 tracks at 8 bit with noisetracker?

It was why I switched to pc, I HAD to. Not long After 32 tracks at 8 bit came 32 tracks at 16 bit on pc for cheap (50$ sb16 card) and fast tracker II.

Amiga never even answered the competition, just kept showing up with the original sound design... For 1200 and a4000 especially, amiga sound was
incredibly out dated...

Does anyone know more about amiga history and the issues of sound?

Amiga sound was decent, and worked for game developers just fine. Is that
why they never messed with it much?

Why didn't they ever do anything better with the sound? Or did some people
within commodore or amiga try to and got shot down?

I'd like to know more about amiga sound and why it was never improved upon
through amiga 1000 all the way to amiga 4000.

[ChaosLord]

Amigas have been using 64 tracks of 16-bit since forever.  Its called Octamed Sound studio.  Its free and fun to use.  Why aren't you using it?

Even in the old A500 7Mhz 68000 days you had 8 channels of 8-bit with Oktalyzer or 7 channels of 8-bit with TFMX.  But that was the 1980's.

In the 1990s lots of trackers came out that supported more than 8 channels and 16-bit samples.

Amiga moved on.  Did you?

[Matt_H]

Yes, on paper, the Amiga's audio capabilities were outclassed by the early 90s. But the Amiga could fake it to more than adequately keep up with PC soundcards. Like with Octamed, as ChaosLord says.

Paula was due to be replaced by something more powerful in the AAA chipset, and we all know the story of how Commodore management botched that one.

[ChaosLord]

But the Amiga could fake it to more than adequately keep up with PC soundcards.

Why is it that when the Amiga uses the CPU to mix sound channels you say it is "faking it" but when 500 million bill gates compatible PCs use the CPU to mix sound channels its "4 realz dewd"?

The vast majority of bill gates compatible pcs do not have a sound card and never will have a sound card.  I certainly never had one on any of mine.  I never met any laptop that had a sound card plugged in.  I only met a few desktops that had one.  Most computers use cheap onboard audio chip.

My 1500 Mhz Athlon Windoze XP box uses the CPU to mix the audio channels when I run audio software that has 4 channels of audio.  My audio drops out all the time when the computer is under high cpu load.

[SamuraiCrow]

I think he's referring to the 14-bit hack that is used to approximate 16-bit sound.

[ChaosLord]

I think he's referring to the 14-bit hack that is used to approximate 16-bit sound.

oic.  In that case he should buy a 16-bit soundcard for his Amiga.

Or talk FPGAreplay or Natami into adding native 16-bit Paula.

[bloodline]

The "problem" with the audio, certainly in the late 80's early 90's was that audio data used up a lot of space... So even if you could play back 16bit 44.1Khz files... You probably wouldn't want to, just because a floppy disk couldn't hold much of that

So with the Amiga, you have audio that is "Good Enough" (TM), at a time when the engineering management don't want to spend money on new chips, and certainly won't spend on a feature that would only have limited/future use... It was such thinking that ultimately killed the platform... To quote Steve Jobs: "You gotta skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is now".

[Bamiga2002]

You're quoting Bill Skates? :insane:

[bloodline]

You're quoting Bill Skates? :insane:

I know, but you see, I don't know about hockey... I do know about Steve Jobs

[bbond007]

Amiga never even answered the competition, just kept showing up with the original sound design... For 1200 and a4000 especially, amiga sound was incredibly out dated...

They had a prototype A3000+ with 16bit 2 channel DSP in addition to the Paula.

They just lacked focus and direction, so they never brought it to market.

I had all sorts of 16bit PC sound cards in the 486 era. Most games did not use use multi-channel digital sounds (via mixing). The 16bit digital sound channel was usually dedicated to sound effects while the multi-voice music was done on the Yamaha FM synth chip which typically made everything sound like an 8bit NES.

There was the Gravis Ultrasound card which was truly amazing, but had very little software support.

That is why people with money would get a Roland MT32 in addition to a SandBlaster.

[paul1981]

16 Bit zorro sound cards were available in the late 80's for the Amiga. How is that being "behind the times" as it were? I'm grateful Amiga had built in sound as standard. The truth is if you wanted 16 bit sound it WAS there, you just needed a Zorro sound card and a free Zorro slot. With Amiga Zorro gear being more expensive that others, maybe it would have been better for the consumer if Amiga's came with usable ISA slots instead, thus opening lots of possibilities, and then PCI... It may have saved the Amiga. Spilt milk though.

[Ral-Clan]

As others have said, Commodore did design a 16-bit Paula replacement, but it was never put into production.

The reason they just stuck with the 8-bit chip was probably that, to most people even in 1993 (i.e. 90% of the users), digitized 8-bit audio was "good enough" for games and other non-critical applications.  Remember, most people were using 1084 monitors with built in (crappy) speakers.  Some of these 1084 monitors were even monophonic.

The only people that would have noticed a real difference between 8 and 16 bit audio, or cared enough to pay for 16-bit audio were musicians and audiophiles.

Sure, if you actually played a 16-bit audio sample beside an 8-bit audio sample, one after the other, most people would probably have noticed the improvement in clarity.  But without them playing side-by-side to spotlight what was missing, most people at the time probably though 8-bit audio was just fine for their needs.

I would suspect that a lot of people today wouldn't even notice or care about the difference between 8-bit audio and 16-bit audio.  My wife, for instance, doesn't care if her favourite song is playing on the little, tinny FM mono radio we have in the kitchen, or our big "hi-fi" stereo - as long as she can hear and enjoy it.

Look at the success of MP3, for instance. Technically, we've taken a step backward in audio quality from Compact Discs but the public is loving it (admittedly, it has other advantages - file size, for instance).

Graphics, on the other hand, seem to be more important to the majority of people.  So it probably made sense to Commodore upgrade the Amiga graphics chipset to AGA and leave the Paula as it was - thereby saving money and keeping the price of their machines lower than the competition.

Look at how many people today buy large HD Televisions, but never buy the surround sound audio system to accompany it.  They are fine with the TV's little built in speakers.  Perhaps humans are more visual than audatory.

[haywirepc]

Yes you COULD buy a 16 bit soundcard, but as usual in amiga land a 16 bit sound card, as I recall was over 200$ and you needed a zorro slot (I had an amiga 500 so that was out)

Conversely, an sb16  (or clone) was like 30-50$.

8 tracks on octamed with paula sounded horrible in comparison to 8 tracks on even the 8 bit soundblaster... And you were still limited to 8 tracks where a cheap pc with 8 bit soundblaster could do 32 track mods or screamtracker modules in stereo.

The 14bit hack sounds okay if your playing a single stereo stream, but it was
not very usuable for mod production.

In any case, I started my digital music creation adventures on an amiga 500. It was very exciting at the time. I used to spend countless hours sampling
sounds, and switching discs between sounds and samples making mods.

It was kind of a let down having to switch, but seeing 8 bit sampled, 32 channels available on a cheapo pc with screamtracker, and especially a bit later seeing 32 and 64 - 16 bit channels available via fasttracker and impulse tracker, I pretty much had to switch.

A comparable amiga setup would have costs me thousands at the time, I would have had to replace my 500 with a 2000 or better, buy a 16 bit soundcard, hard drives and so on...

[Matt_H]

I think he's referring to the 14-bit hack that is used to approximate 16-bit sound.

That, and the fact that though the hardware is specified as being capable of only 4 channels, you're clearly getting more than that with Octamed and similar trackers. I call that faking it. And I don't mean that in a bad way.

Yes you COULD buy a 16 bit soundcard, but as usual in amiga land a 16 bit sound card, as I recall was over 200$ and you needed a zorro slot (I had an amiga 500 so that was out)

Conversely, an sb16  (or clone) was like 30-50$.

8 tracks on octamed with paula sounded horrible in comparison to 8 tracks on even the 8 bit soundblaster... And you were still limited to 8 tracks where a cheap pc with 8 bit soundblaster could do 32 track mods or screamtracker modules in stereo.

The 14bit hack sounds okay if your playing a single stereo stream, but it was
not very usuable for mod production.

In any case, I started my digital music creation adventures on an amiga 500. It was very exciting at the time. I used to spend countless hours sampling
sounds, and switching discs between sounds and samples making mods.

It was kind of a let down having to switch, but seeing 8 bit sampled, 32 channels available on a cheapo pc with screamtracker, and especially a bit later seeing 32 and 64 - 16 bit channels available via fasttracker and impulse tracker, I pretty much had to switch.

A comparable amiga setup would have costs me thousands at the time, I would have had to replace my 500 with a 2000 or better, buy a 16 bit soundcard, hard drives and so on...

Well, until the storage capabilities of CD audio caught on in the late 90s, it seems like nearly all PC music was third-rate synthesized MIDI. In my opinion, the Amiga outclassed it in every way with the real-instrument samples embedded in mods, regardless of bitrate.

Yes, it would have been nice if some newer sound hardware had been built in to newer Amigas, but given that your floppy-only A500 was going toe-to-toe with big-box PCs for so long, that's certainly something to be proud of. The shrinking Amiga market post-Commodore made it difficult to stay competitive on price, but I think the competitiveness of technical capability was there with Zorro cards.

[Plaz]

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/ad516

This in a zorro Amiga outperformed most anything pc based at the time. I still own two of them. I also moved to pc when commodore closed. I had to go back to Amiga/AD516 after much lost time and work on inferior wintel based alternatives of the day. And that was after spending over $200 on a PC turtle beach card. (AD cards far more expensive, but quality ain't cheap) SB cards of the day were too noisy for serious recording. I had tape decks that were quieter.

It wasn't until winXP with improved SB cards many years later that wintel surpassed the Ami solution and the AD's still hold their own against the low-mid pc stuff.

Plaz