In case it's unclear, my computer music career began with OctaMED. 
AmigaFormat gave it away totally for free on a cover-disk. It was a very 
old version though.

MED stands for Music EDitor. The original MED was unremarkable. It was 
compatible with the other tracker programs, and had a similar GUI.

OctaMED was different: Using realtime software down-mixing, it was able 
to play 8 tracks simultaneously, even though the Amiga's "Paula" sound 
chip only provides 4 channels. Today this is pretty mundane; even 
freebie programs use software mixing to mix hundreds of tracks together. 
But with a 4 MHz CPU, this was a major undertaking, and the result was 
hailed as a revolution. Sure, your entire computer slowed to a crawl, 
but you could play EIGHT TRACKS AT ONCE!

For those who weren't there, Amiga music is basically sample-based. You 
record ("sample") a single note from, say, a flute. You then play it 
back at different playback speeds to get different notes. This produces 
a characteristic effect: low notes are longer than high notes, and 
usually low notes sound more grainey.

OctaMED added the inovation of "synthasounds". This is basically what we 
today would casually refer to as wavetable synthesis, but back then it 
was brand new. You have a small set of tools with which you can draw 
waveforms. You then execute a small program written in a (very) simple 
programming language which changes waveform at certain moments, and can 
also modulate pitch and so on. The result is generally chip noises 
reminiscent of the 8-bit age. (OctaMED also implements "hybrid" sounds, 
which are normal samples but with their parameters tweaked in realtime 
by the synthasound programming language.)

OctaMED, unlike the other trackers, also supported MIDI. And I don't 
just mean it could send note on and note off messages. It could record 
incomming MIDI data, including SysEx messages. (I haven't found any PC 
software that can do this yet, so all my Yamaha data is still on my old 
Amiga.) It could both send and receive timing data, start/stop messages, 
it could handle multiple MIDI channels and send arbitrary MIDI messages. 
You could write a tune where part was the Amiga's sample output, and 
part was a MIDI instrument. (You obviously need equipment to mix the 
resulting sound signals though.)

OctaMED continued to add more new features, until OctaMED SoundStudio 
arrived. This was another ground-breaking step forward. OctaMED SS 
allows you to have AN UNLIMINTED NUMBER OF TRACKS! Obviously, if you 
have too many, your CPU will melt and you have to hit the "panic button" 
to halt playback. (LMB + RMB for 3 seconds.)

On top of that, each track can have ANY STEREO LOCATION! (The Amiga's 
hardware tracks are hard-wired. Two are 100% left, two are 100% right. 
This limitation persists in 8-channel mode.)

On top of that, you can now use 16-bit samples! (The Amiga's hardware 
only supports 8-bit samples, and all other tracker programs reflect this 
limitation.)

On top of THAT, you can play back in 14-bit quality! On a standard, 
unmodified Amiga! (It puts two channels at full volume, and two at the 
lowest non-zero volume, and routes the LSBs to the quiet channels.)

On top of that, if you happen to own a (ludicrously expensive) 16-bit 
auto card, OctaMED will of course utilise it for true 16-bit playback.

On top of all that, you can save the downmix to your harddrive. 
(Assuming you have one. And if you don't, this feature is more or less 
useless. You can't fit many seconds of audio data onto high-density 
floppy disks!) In particular, if you have a (quite expensive) CD-R 
drive, you can burn REAL CDs THAT ACTUAL CD PLAYERS CAN PLAY, directly 
from your Amiga! True hi-fi 16-bit CD-quality audio, right there!

(Stop laughing at the back there! This was a BIG DEAL 15 years ago!!)

In particular, even if your CPU couldn't handle playing 64 tracks in 
realtime, you could still downmix it and write it to CD anyway.

On top of all that, you could apply "effects" to your song. Actually, 
these "effects" were limited to narrowing/widening the stereo image, and 
applying a trivial echo. (The echo's decay was implemented as a bitwise 
shift, so the only possible decay values are 50%, 25%, 12.5% or 6.25%.) 
They were planning to add more; I don't know if they ever did.

So you see, while SoundTracker and ProTracker let you play back samples 
on each of the Amiga's four 8-bit sound channels, the OctaMED linage 
far, far transcended these limitations, with features like MIDI, 
wavetables and unlimited channels.

Also, rather like the "pixel editors" of old, OctaMED had a 
sophisticated sample editor, of the kind you just don't see today. (I 
guess because there's no need for one any more.) Although, if I knew 
then what I know now about DSP, I could have implemented *real* 
filtering operations...

(OctaMED's "low-pass filter" option is just a trivial moving-average 
filter. The only adjustible thing is the window width and how much to 
mix the filtered and original signals.)

Incidentally, the retro-sounding clip1.mp3 is actually me, using OctaMED 
SoundStudio. It's not a C64 at all; I'm just imitating the style. (If it 
were a C64, it wouldn't be stereophonic for starters...)

Post a reply to this message