When I was a young kid, my family had a Commodore 64. It sounds 
approximately something like this:

http://download.orphi.me.uk/Music/Clip1.mp3

(Alternatively, go hit YouTube. You'll find thousands of reconstructed 
C64 recordings, and a few genuine ones.)

And then, one day I came home and found the family gathered around the 
TV. And that's because my dad had just brought home a new kind of 
computer, and it sounded like this:

http://download.orphi.me.uk/Music/Clip2.mp3

My eyes nearly fell out of their sockets. I couldn't believe that we 
actually owned a computer that could sound this amazing. (Trust me, the 
other 3:30 of this track sound equally astonishing.) And there's more:

http://download.orphi.me.uk/Music/Clip3.mp3

(This one also goes on for about 4 minutes, yet fits on a single 
double-density floppy disk. For those of you who aren't that old, today 
we have high-density disks, which reputedly hold 1.44 MB of data. This 
was a double-density disk, the format that came *before* high-density, 
and it holds about 720 KB depending on which way you format it. You 
could still buy single-density disks in shops; those hold about 360 KB.)

Bear in mind, at the time when this happened, you could go into an 
actual music shop and buy actual CDs for actual money containing stuff 
like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qriH-8yeqcE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txQQzZ49zZA

Not so far removed from the clips above, eh? Back then, the idea of 
making cutting-edge music in your bedroom using only a home computer 
didn't seem nearly so far-out.

I doubt anything this astonishing is ever likely to happen again in my 
own lifetime.

(The irony, of course, is that today you can WATCH ACTUAL TV on a cheap 
home computer, render 3D graphics IN REAL TIME, and do countless other 
things that would have seemed laughable back then. And yet, people are 
seldom wowed any more...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> I doubt anything this astonishing is ever likely to happen again in my 
> own lifetime.

Heh. And people wonder why Amiga users are such zeolots...

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>> I doubt anything this astonishing is ever likely to happen again in my 
>> own lifetime.
>
> Heh. And people wonder why Amiga users are such zeolots...

I remember on my Acorn there were lots of programs that would let you play 
and edit all those amiga music formats.  No doubt that the Amiga really 
invented (or at least made popular) that method of creating and storing 
music.  Actually just a few months back I ripped all the data off my Acorn 
to my PC to run under the emulator and came across all those music files 
that are just a few 10's of kilobytes.  Amazingly WinAmp could play them 
straight!

Actually there are more sophisticated programs still available and used 
today based on them, my friend used to use "FruityLoops" or something to 
make music on his PC.

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scott wrote:

> I remember on my Acorn there were lots of programs that would let you 
> play and edit all those amiga music formats.  No doubt that the Amiga 
> really invented (or at least made popular) that method of creating and 
> storing music.  Actually just a few months back I ripped all the data 
> off my Acorn to my PC to run under the emulator and came across all 
> those music files that are just a few 10's of kilobytes.  Amazingly 
> WinAmp could play them straight!

Yes, the default install of WinAmp handles (IIRC) SoundTracker, 
NoiseTracker and ProTracker file formats.

Unfortunately, it does *not* correctly handle the newer features of 
OctaMED's files. (E.g., synthasounds, 8-channel mode, mix mode, etc.) It 
plays the files, but it plays them incorrectly, blindly ignoring the 
newer features. It's like people think that the tracker linage stopped 
with ProTracker.

> Actually there are more sophisticated programs still available and used 
> today based on them, my friend used to use "FruityLoops" or something to 
> make music on his PC.

Jeskola Buzz (AKA The Crash Monster) uses a tracker-like sequencing UI. 
It's still quite popular in a few places. Certainly it's quite a fast 
way to quickly enter perfectly quantinised notes. (Few tracker 
interfaces seem to have the advanced features of OctaMED like chord mode 
or autospacing, or the sophisticated editing like block split/join, 
track remap and so on.) For expressive lead playing, a more modern MIDI 
sequencer with realtime record/playback works better.

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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...)

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scott wrote:
> Actually there are more sophisticated programs still available and used
> today based on them, my friend used to use "FruityLoops" or something to
> make music on his PC.

But some people still use good old trackers. I think the main use is for 
keygens. People who reverse-engineer copy protection *and* compose music, 
then you get a 40KB little tool with 2 minutes of music, cool background 
graphics, and a serial number in the middle :P

Most of this has been made for keygens or demos:
http://www.hotplate.co.nz/files/all_mods/dualtrax/

(Playable with VLC, WinAmp, MikMod, or (preferably) XMplay.)

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