Amiga Music: Thunder Compilation #2 

Oh yes, OpenMPT is the best!

I have the TOSEC collection basically everything that was released for the Amiga EU US SEA 25gig if you would like a copy let me know.😜

Finally!

For those unaware this means xmplay and others also gets support via libopenmpt

the Ompt cannot emulate the music line editor

The art has moved into VSTs and DAWs.

@@jimbotron70 You Fuck !!! :) Aie Aie Aie !!!! Gooooooood !!!! ART !!!

yes Good !!!

The same, it was not long ago, I learned about it, I wonder why they did not use AHI, or at least support it. the sound quality is amazing.

It came out after the Amiga died commercially.

I had the honor to know Gary D. personally. Was also allowed to stand on stage with him in 1997. :) He was a cool guy.

When the clapping and high-hats kick in and you go umsk-umsk-umsk. :D If Armin Van Buuren and Tiësto had an Amiga, they would have been creaming into their pants. he-he

@@BillAnt Maybe they started with Amigas. Who knows. I know, that Axwell is also coming from the demoscene and created music with Protracker. Also Noisecontrollers was a Fasttracker Musican. :-)

old

Gary D. used n-track studio in those days. ;)

What you did then? If youre "glad" link things you've done (videos), or just playing like a fat these 3 pixel games.

@@rovstam7989 ah, another passive-agressive Incel. Nice try though.

I just upgraded both systems - crazy - but just too much fun!

@@KarynRobertsUSA - Would be crazy not to enhance the full power of Amiga :-)

I just upgraded my A500 with the TF card, SD card harddrive, USB emulator and 1MB of chip ram, that 1MB made the difference, I can now add loads more samples, what MODS have you made, you got them up anywhere?

It took a lot of skill to make a mod sound like a "real" song. I came from the PC scene and impulse tracker was pretty much as near as you could get, each track was multi-timbral so when you triggered a new note the last one would fade out as opposed to being cut off dead. This really helped. The only other major hurdle was mastering, in the end we used to export the individual tracks and remaster them in an audio editor. Of course by 2000 propellerheads launched reason and it was just too tempting. However I really struggled moving to a mouse clicking interface, inputting the notes via a keyboard was what made tracking so much fun and fast. What took me an hour in impulse tracker would take me a week in reason. I made a bit of money from music but ultimately gave it up as it just took me too long to write songs in reason. I wish in a way I'd never have heard of MODS as I'd have never have longed for that UI all us module composers know and love.

There's gotta be something out there for you, the tracking scene never died, so surely someone's made a tracking type interface for the more professional musicians? I love OpenMPT. Looking forward to using it to make some long, meandering ambient tracks for my game - they will be really long songs but very small file size because they'll be .IT files :)

What about Renoise bluebull399?

I've tried renoise and many others but nothing is as fast and intuitive as impulse tracker was. I'm doing other things with my life now anyway so I simply don't get time to make music any more.

@@bluebull399 You can still run Impulse Tracker on a modern computer if you use an emulator such as DOSBox. Have you tried using OpenMPT configured to use the same keyboard layout as Impulse Tracker?

Amiga was a very powerful tool if you know how to unlock it's full potential back in the day, no popping transistors it was happy to push the envelope all day long.

100% agree with you!

Haha same

But he also said that he recorded this recording on an improved version of the "Amiga" computer and with updated software! That's why it doesn't sound like a "normal tracker".

@@tufelkahonda5323 Its Paula audio, not AHI but as you say it takes some CPU power, to mix and produce 14bit sound.

No SID here, LOL... SID is C64, not Amiga.

Особенно я бы хотел отметить "The Secret" Это просто божественно

@@gingerfox4796 она играла в ролике у goldenplay)

@@user-bw6bc2rr3b а в каком,если не секрет?)

@@gingerfox4796 Не знаю!))))

Hmmm, where have I seen your name before, Amiga mods or game maybe?

After checking your profile and a little research, you're the guy that did Capital Punishment music, very good stuff :))

off1k Thank you ;) Yep. Check out my channel here "djnykk"

they *were* great

And almost king of graphics in 80’s, if we ignore the none std CAD graphic cards.

Any CD with this music is for sale ?

+nrdesign1991 Definitely some, maybe not with this software but I have uploaded a commercially released album that was created using Amiga's Octamed Sound Studio. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eZD6Vo093_o.html

Fat boy slim was an Amiga fan.

Are you sure? I think he used Atari ST actually.. might be wrong though :) I've heard that Aphex Twin used Amiga though.

Every old cherry moon trax to thunderdome?

No, you're correct. Although he may have been a fan of both.

This is the exact same sound chip that's in an Amiga 1000 from 1985, the difference is they changed/removed filters but it's still the same chip. All Amiga's have the same sound chip, a 4 hardware mono channel DMA PCM named Paula. Amiga was a very flexible system and when you add some more cpu grunt and memory, it can do some serious tunes by adding in software channels, software DSP, up the resolution to 14bit and use 16bit samples. I used to have an Amiga 1200 with an 060/50Mhz chip in it and it could handle this software with 40+ channels and DSP, I kinda miss that Amiga, I ended up selling it waaaay too cheap :( Here's another example, a commercially released album which used Octamed Soundstudio, a mix of 8 & 16 bit samples and variable amount of channels. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eZD6Vo093_o.html :)) A stock Amiga 500 at 7Mhz can still handle 8 channels, some games used 7 voice routines like Turrican series, Apidya, Jim Power and a few others, the game Stardust used 6 channels. If you search through my channel you will find some of the best 4 channel tunes Amiga has to offer, check out Hoffman and Esau, these guys are still releasing quality tunes today :))

Huh. Well, that's also an option I guess. Just throw more power at it. XD That's how software midi synths work after all... That it's same hardware I guess doesn't really matter if there's enough processing power to mix things. Though as I don't know the details of any of the hardware I have no idea how much the sound chip itself accomplishes compared to the CPU mixing things. I do know about several of the consoles. The Mega Drive, which has a mixture of a PCM sample chip with an FM synthesis chip. Different sound and capabilities, but very similar in nature to the adlib cards in PC's. The snes with it's 8 channel 16 bit ADPCM sample player with lots of effects (primarily pitch shifting of course, which is the key to making any kind of music with it.) - strictly speaking it's a DSP with a dedicated CPU driving it. Seems superficially similar to the Amiga, but constrained by having only 64 kilobytes of RAM and no way for the audio co-processor to read directly from any external memory. (even so some of the best things on the system stream audio samples in realtime into audio memory. - and also somehow manage to play 16 tracks of audio on it. No idea how given the constraints on it...) The N64 which can mix up to 100 audio channels in theory, but each one takes up 1% of the CPU time. The audio hardware such as it is is part of the graphics chip, and I don't really know that much about it's abilities aside from the fact that it requires some processing to function, and that you can hand this task to the CPU, but the GPU can also do it. (The graphics chip in the system is basically a CPU similar to the main CPU with a specialised DSP for graphics functions though, so it's hardly a surprise it can do other things.) The Original Playstation, which is a vastly upgraded version of the snes audio chipset. Again no huge surprise there because it was designed by sony. Old systems do have a lot of interesting qualities. I keep weighing up getting an Amiga. Saw an Amiga 2000 recently for a fairly low price, and 500's are pretty common. It's definitely a fascinating system and I'd love to investigate it more closely...

Amiga is simpley 2 DACs and PCM with 4 mono channels, each with it's own DMA channel (all channels are independent) attached to a stereo output, 2 for left and 2 for right, first system out of the box in regards to sample playback AFAIK. No synth or FM, up to 28khz or 56khz frequency depending on screen khz, DMA can be disabled to gain higher freqs but pointless in my opinion. There is hundreds of audio programs and routines as Amiga is easy to tap into, it what makes this system very flexible, you want the Amiga to sound similar to a C64 then use AHX, it's a music making program that doesn't use samples, I plan to upload AHX files in future. Here's one of my favourite AHX tunes. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ePmWp1e9RM0.html Megadrive has a very poor PCM channel but in the right hands they can make it sound ok, MD sound effects are horrible to my ear most of the time but the music can be very good. The 2 things that downgrades the SNES audio imo is the 64kb limitation as you mentioned (fancy dropping in a 16bit sample playback chip but then crippling it with only 64kb) and that horrible low pass filter, Amiga 1000s and very early Amiga 500s also suffer from low pass filters (can be turned off in software), they changed them in later revisions. SNES audio is compressed to approx 3.5:1 ratio from what I understand so they can fit approximately 230kb into 64kb but all tunes, samples and song data must fit into that unless there's some sort of bank switching routine but I'm not sure, they would have used 8bit samples in many of the games to save on space. I'm not sure what you mean by 16 tracks, are you saying 16 channels or the number of music tracks, if it's music tracks then it's because all the tunes share the same samples but if you're saying channels then maybe software routines like in this video, do you have any links or examples ? I would be interested to hear/see. I don't know anything about N64, you just educated me in regards to that system. The 8bit and 16bit generation was a very unique period, it was a lot easier to tell what system a game was being played on without seeing the console/computer just by simply looking at the visuals or hearing the audio. If you're interested in an Amiga system then it will depend on what you want it for and how much you're willing to spend, I would suggest an Amiga1200, it's the best balance but they're not going that cheap but havn't checked in a while :))

Ah, that explains a lot about things. And definitely explains why you gain so much in software. I see amiga 500's for sale on a regular basis, but anything else tends to be quite rare, so in that sense it's a bit limiting. If I could find a 1200 somewhere and it wasn't terrifyingly expensive, that'd be quite tempting. But I rarely see those for sale, let along for a good price... As for the snes, yes, I recently listened to several things through a pair relatively high end sennheiser headphones. The bass response on those is fairly neutral, so I was quite surprised to hear just how much of a kick the bass on the snes had. Very heavy indeed. (well, particularly some of the samples used in starfox) I don't know too many coding examples for complex stuff on the snes, but if you want a technical demonstration of the system being pushed to it's limits, the japanese game Tales of Phantasia is the best thing to examine. I was referring to 16 channel audio by the way. Not entirely sure if it isn't just a cheat of some kind, but Tales of Phantasia definitely seems to behave as if it has 16 channels, even though the hardware only has 8 channels officially. It also has an intro song with full vocals. And a very sophisticated 'sound test' screen that lets you play all the tracks and sound effects, alter the filter parameters, switch dynamically between mono, stereo and surround, turn echo on and off, pitch shift, alter the tempo, and alter EQ settings... And includes both a spectrum analyser and an indicator for what's playing on any given audio channel. Kind of absurd for what is basically an audio test screen. Someone involved in that game REALLY liked their music. XD But yes, that 64 kilobytes... If it were able to read directly from cartridge ROM it would have been a lot better, and the amount of RAM wouldn't have mattered so much. Even so, that opening song in tales of Phantasia... Many people like to rip the sound out of snes games using emulators. These then become standalone SFC files. If you do this with Tales of Phantasia though, you find most of the sound samples, and especially the vocals are missing. What the game seems to do is load new samples into memory as they're played, thus circumventing the 64 kilobyte limit using streaming audio. As for using 8 bit samples, I'm not sure that's possible. The audio compression routine is some kind of fixed function inside the audio chip. ALL samples have to be encoded as blocks of 16 samples, each of which encodes a 16 bit value as 4 bits. Thus the base unit of audio in the snes is 32 bytes compressed into 9. And while it looks like you can mess with the compression parameters, (which likely would affect the quality), the actual audio samples are fixed at 32kz 16 bit samples. There are two other things you can apparently do though. The chip has an echo buffer, which is used to add an echo effect to sound samples, but you can exploit it to play uncompressed samples. The other thing that's possible is that the cartridge and expansion port have audio pins. (one for the left and Right channels). Anything you put on these pins bypasses the sound chip and is mixed directly into the audio output. This is likely how CD audio would have worked if the CD drive had ever been released. The sound chip is irrelevant in this case, aside from that you are still restricted to the output signal being 16 bit, 32 khz. (I don't know if the audio pins are analog or digital though. That is, does it mix it together before, or after the audio chip DAC?) One amusing thing that this implies is you can stick other audio chips in cartridges or an expansion device... Has very amusing implications (I got a stock of YM2612's off youtube recently for instance), but was never used in anything contemporary to the system. I guess I'm looking into snes homebrew at the moment, which is why I have a lot more technical details for that system in my head than some of the others. By the mid 90's PC's already had 16 bit 44khz sample playback, so you could basically do anything you liked in software. The N64 had similar abilities clearly, though I do wonder where the 100 channel audio comes from, and whether that was just some standard software audio player provided to developers or if there is actual hardware functionality related to that. Not many people do homebrew development of any kind on the n64, so finding information about it is quite a challenge sometimes. Of course, you can infer things from the games themselves, such as the later generation games like Perfect Dark and Conker's bad fur day having licenses related to mp3 decoding listed in the game credits. Which explains a lot about how a game with 64 megabytes of storage can have full voice acting... I would assume by that point you can kind of do whatever you can think of with it though. And the sample limitations of the snes wouldn't matter either, since if it's anything like how the N64 can deal with texture data, you can basically read directly off the cartridge. I mean, the 4 or 8 megabytes of unified memory in the n64 isn't needed half the time because in many cases the ROM is almost as fast as main memory, and you can read directly from it. Rare apparently noted that Goldeneye would have been impossible on the system due to lack of RAM if this wasn't the case... Very interesting system in a lot of ways, but perhaps not so much if you're focused on audio only. Too bad cartridges were so costly back then. Nowadays you can get a 4 gigabit flash memory chip (about 512 megabytes, comparable to a CD) for the kind of prices that in 1996 you couldn't even get 8 megabytes for. Since the cartridge address space on the n64 is 4 gigabytes, you could do some crazy things on the system nowadays that would have been technically possible back then, but completely unaffordable to release due to cartridge production costs... Anyway, I think I'm drifting dangerously far off topic here... XD I do find the snes audio chip fascinating in how unsuitable it seems to have been for a console that has to be sold at a low price. It's the kind of audio chip that should have had like 512 kilobytes of RAM at least, not 64... How anyone thought that was a good idea... XD I mean, it isn't just that. The cartridge space games had was also strictly limited. If you had to cram 512 kilobytes of Audio samples onto a cartridge that was only 2-3 megabytes total, that cuts into the space you have for other things. Meanwhile, since the Mega Drive was using FM synthesis, you don't even need to store any sample data at all for music. Just the composition and the audio parameters for whatever instruments. All in all it seems to have been too far ahead of it's time for it's own good. It worked, sure, but it was hardly doing it's capabilities justice with all those memory constraints going on... Then again apparently the snes had to had a lot of cost-cutting alterations at the last minute. Among the rumoured things was the original design having a 10 mhz motorola 68000 CPU, and the graphics chip clearly supporting 128 kilobytes of VRAM even in the final design. (not physically installed, but all the address lines and so on are still present, and the programming manuals keep warning about memory areas that aren't physically present.) That certainly would have explained why there is a high resolution mode and 256 colour per tile mode that never got used. - Because both those modes tend to be impractical with just 64 kilobytes of VRAM... Similarly it wouldn't seem particularly surprising if the Audio hardware was either specified with more than 64 kilobytes of RAM, or some way to read directly from ROM without assistance from the main CPU, but that some kind of cost reduction was made last second. A system like the Amiga still has to be made to a budget, but not quite so extreme as a console being sold for $200... XD Anyway... I think I've said way too much already... XD

Bloody hell, when is the book coming out :D and I thought I typed long comments. I had heard many years ago they managed to bypass the 64kb limitation and samples on the fly but I had no clue as to which games or even if it was true so thanks for that. After some minor research, this technique was only used a small number of times, most people reference Tales of Phantasia and Lion King it seems. Anyway I have all the SPC music set files and found Tales of Phantasia and had a listen using BZR Player, they didn't sound like 16 channel tunes to me, however they were impressive and the quality was very good. I then had to load the game up in Snes9x to check the audio options, very interesting. I'm guessing the musician developed his own audio routine and it seems they are spooling some samples off the cart on the fly like you said. There are no vocal samples in the SPC files, again like you said, only the instrumental version of the opening track is there. Although there are 16 level meters, the most used at any one time is 11 maybe 12, (I didn't check every tune but most) majority of the tunes I listened to used no more than 8 level meters, maybe empty meters are used for sound effects or maybe using up too much CPU time, all speculation anyway. Why I was thinking 8bit samples is I know with some SNES games the Amiga was used for some of the development tools, mainly audio and graphics and converted them to suit SNES. Most likely Euro and maybe some US cross platform games and definitely ports of Amiga games. I didn't know the SNES was locked at 32khz, always thought it was arbitrary like the Amiga. The Amiga can play any freq up to 28khz or 56khz, you can mix and play different freqs at the same time natively using less than 1% of CPU time. It's kinda similar to the video modes on Amiga, the Amiga can display multiple resolutions at the same time on 1 screen natively, only system to ever do that AFAIK, they use that technique with some of the games to gain more colours among other things. A 10Mhz M68k and 128kb VRam would of made a lot more sense, that CPU wouldn't have a problem keeping up with the custom hardware. 16bit PCM is silly considering cost of ROM but having said that I think the retail price may have only increased by $50 to $100 US dollars. That would have easily been worth the difference compared to MD/Genesis. In the end they made the right decision, it did dominate the main markets anyway but I would have much preferred the extra hardware and would of easily bought it. I didn't buy a SNES or MD back in the day just so you know. I have an MD with everdrive now and SNES on my custom Arcade, I will be adding Tales of Phantasia to my Arcade pretty soon me thinks ;). The Amiga on the otherhand is completely different system structure in regards to budget, there are many more components and software to add plus that Amiga was built mostly from the ground up. The Amiga has many firsts and is one of only very few home Computers/Consoles to be way ahead of it's time. For $1600 US in 1985 it was pretty cheap in comparison to other Computers considering what it could do. I would suggest watching History of Amiga (1992) here on youtube, it's a pretty good watch ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-zq1s77nzpYk.html and even better "From Bedrooms to Billions - The Amiga Years" (2016) (2 hours 31 minutes) www.frombedroomstobillions.com/amiga there's nothing on youtube so either buy it or find a torrent but I highly recommend it if you want to know more. :))