Amiga Samplers: Budget dance music in 1990 | Hacker News Reader

Amiga Samplers: Budget dance music in 1990

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I’ll never enjoy computing again as much as I did as a teenager with an Amiga 500, a CD ROM with CDs full of mod files and Fred Fish disks, and my trusty 8 bit sampler. Sampling and making extended mixes of favourite rave tunes from the era, recording them to tape and playing them on a Walkman to friends at school who had no idea computers could do such things!

Making 15 minute mashups of this and dancing like loons to it in the break room. Thanks, Amiga!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yefUXmB9n6c

I can credit those years to a love of programming and now being a developer of audio FX plugins!

Likewise! What sort of plugins are you making?

Two of us are making spectral fx. Wouldn’t really have been possible on a 68000 :)

https://gs-dsp.com/

Note we offer a completely free, midi modulation plugin (MMM) too there.

Also available on iOS where it's especially super useful.

Are you in Vienna too!?

Nice clean looking plugins, will give them a try tonight

Thank you! Hope you enjoy them. And if you have any questions that aren’t answered on the site or videos just reach out. We love talking to the folks using our stuff.

Nice! Just wondering if you considered using JUCE?

The plugins are built with juce v6

Correct. Although next update will be 7, not that it makes much difference. We only really use the plugin format abstraction and a little of the GUI stuff. Our audio path is all our own algorithms. JUCE audio stuff isn’t really it’s strong point. Although plenty good enough for many applications.

Hey, nice work - yes, I am also in Vienna (I maintain the JUCE-based plugins for Austrian Audio - see https://austrian.audio/software/) so its nice to meet another plugin dev - any chance you'd consider giving a technical workshop on your plugins at a local hackerspace I attend (https://gtblank.org/) - there are other audio hackers in that scene who would be quite intrigued by your experience, I think!

Check out the exhibit at the RetroGaming Museum (nebenbei des Haus Des Meeres) some time, let us know! We have Amiga! :)

Hey send us a mail and we can maybe work something out :)

mail@gs-dsp.com

I've been wanting to check out that museum and I live nearby so now I have an even better excuse.

Yes, the amiga was so good for it's time.

It is crazy how commodore f*ked up.

It's their own fault: they basically did nothing for ~7 years. The chip set barely changed from 1985 until 1992 with AGA. ECS barely added anything, and AGA was too little, too late. The huge lead the Amiga had in the mid 80's was gone by the early 90's.

If you look at some retro conferences, where former engineers take part in Q&A sessions, lots of it were caused by internal issues.

Yes, I'm not blaming the engineers. The company was dysfunctional. The Amiga was still an amazing platform from 1985 to around 1992, when you could get cheap 386 boxes with SVGA and Soundblaster cards. After that point, there was really no way back.

Commodore didn't exactly help matters, but the M68k platform was also a dead-end by the mid-90s. Which is why the Atari ST line also died around the same time.

Meanwhile you started to have machines based on RISC architectures (or high-performance x86, of course) for which custom hardware chips as found in the Amiga were just not as relevant.

True, but Apple had similar issues and were able to port their OS to PowerPC. Old apps still ran with an emulator.

Trouble is, most Amiga "apps" were games running on bare metal hardware with tight timing constraints, so emulation was not really a feasible solution. A similar situation to modern consoles, for which backwards compatibility often involves keeping the original hardware even on subsequent systems.

True, true. Perhaps they could've had an "A1200-on-a-card" or something for the games.

>they basically did nothing for ~7 years.

Much worse than nothing. Cancelled finished and near-finished projects by the Amiga teams.

Reference: "Commodore The Inside Story: The Untold Tale of a Computer Giant", David Pleasance, ISBN 978-1913491659.

> "I’ll never enjoy computing again as much as I did as a teenager with an Amiga 500 ..."

Same. It really was magic exploration.

I've come across your plugins recently - your spectral vocoder looks unreal. Kudos to you for doing something different :) I wish you the best!

Thank you for the kind words!

We love all our plugins but yes MagicFusion is basically unique :)

The Amiga is still my favorite computer. Seeing a game like "Blood Money" or "Shadow of the Beast" in 1989 was absolutely mind blowing.

I think I’m going to have to fire up the emulator again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Created_Disco

> I Created Disco is the debut studio album by Scottish musician Calvin Harris

> All recording and producing for the album took place on an Amiga computer with OctaMED

https://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/interview-calvin-harris...

OctaMED was mind blowing. So many hours of joy spent on that.

going from 4 channels to 8 blew my mind

I had a Roland D10 that I used with octomed (using MIDI) and the D10 did most of the work, with samples from the Amiga adding the icing

love those days

Trackers are amazing and they still live on, for example, https://dirtywave.com/products/m8-tracker

although I have no background on playing trackers, I find my philosophy of designing music language very close to the idea of trackers (https://glicol.org). and it also occurred to me: maybe in the future we would say Algorave is the budget dance music in 2020?

This was my Algorave performance during the pandemic (I was actually tested positive 3 days before the performance streaming):

https://youtu.be/atoTujbQdwI?si=qVWvJrDZ0rupPIqf&t=260

A good modern tracker is Renoise. It has modern plugin support, runs on most OSs and is still being developed.

The Amiga MOD sound is quite distinctive because it uses very low-res instrument samples (typically 8-bit, 8 kHz) played back at different sample rates.

Only four channels were available, so each of those crunchy samples gets to be heard in the mix too.

It was amazing at the time and still sounds unique in its way.

A few PC games used Amiga MOD soundtracks too. Star Control II (1992) comes to mind because it was a very early example of Internet crowdsourcing: the music was created by MOD composers around the world.

I remember several PC games with "amiga music". Settlers (the original), SuperFrog, Pinball Fantasies, and so on. Most likely because they were amiga ports. They didn't necessarily use the MOD format all of them, but still. I remember ripping the music from SuperFrog and Settlers at least.

A little later, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and Deus Ex all used tracker music, to enduring acclaim.

Interesting that UT decided not to just play back an MP3, as that would be too heavy on CPU's time budget, and settled on mods instead. IIRC, Quake's music (by Trent Reznor) was just played back from the game's CD, which means that most people never got to experience it (as most people played the pirated copy of the game, without the audio CD tracks).

>Settlers (the original)

Was written in 68k assembly. The port either implemented an emulator or translated the code ahead of time.

I think Lemmings used MODs too (or at least the music was easily converted to MOD format, because there are MODs of the soundtrack available which sound exactly the same as the in-game music) - https://www.camanis.net/lemmings/music.php. Anyway, the original soundtrackers were very much built around the Amiga sound hardware's capabilities, which was pretty good for the time - there was a custom chip that could play 4 channels of 8-bit samples where you only had to supply the memory offset, the frequency, volume etc. and then the actual playing and mixing of the channels would be done automatically. So this was of course ideal for game music, because it used very little CPU time. Later trackers were able to offer up to 8 channels by mixing 2 channels into 1 hardware channel (the first of them being OctaMED - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OctaMED), but these couldn't be used in games on the original Amiga.

> I think Lemmings used MODs too

Lemmings was originally published for Amiga, so that decision makes sense.

Lemmings and its expansion packs used a custom format called "SoundPlayer", written by Scott Johnson of DMA Design. I believe the name comes from a string seen inside the replayer code.

* The music as found on Amiga Lemmings disks: https://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/SoundPlayer

* Source of replayer code: http://wt.exotica.org.uk/players.html

Lemmings 2 and the All New World of Lemmings used MED by Teijo Kinnunen, as did most later DMA Design titles (Walker, Hired Guns)

The port of Lemmings to the Acorn Archimedes actually used a MOD file, presumably because Protracker is not native to the Acorn, but it was a popular format at the time and several people had written replayers for the Acorn

While you say "the music was easily converted"... that's not always true. The SoundPlayer format, based on reading its replayer code, supports 38 sound samples. Protracker supports 31 samples at most. Had the Lemmings music _used_ 38 samples, converting to Protracker would've come undone.

Similarly, while MED can be converted to Protracker, Protracker doesn't support all MED's commands, timings, synthetic instruments, and it actually does sound different and worse... provided the music made any use of those extra capabilities.

Quite a few games did have CPU-intensive mixing for multiple sound channels, but only as title-screen music, not in-game. Famously there is TFMX 7V format used by Chris Huelsbeck (Turrican 2, Turrican 3, Apidya, Metal Law) but also Hippel 7V used by Jochen Hippel (Amberstar, Ghost Battle, Lethal Xcess) and Oktalyzer. Furthermore, Super Stardust used the increased CPU capabilities of the A1200/A4000 to have its title music in ScreamTracker 3 (S3M) format.

Thanks for the details, and also for the link! I was an Amiga owner/fan in the 1990s, but I'm not that into retrocomputing, so my info is a bit incomplete. Looks like there was a lot of in-house/not widely available software back in the day which was "kind of like SoundTracker, but not quite" - for instance I looked up another old favourite of mine (Lionheart) and found out that the music was composed with a tool called "Sonic Arranger" - the screenshots look familiar, but it looks like it also supported "synthesized" instruments, not only samples.

Pretty sure you could use octaMED music in games as long as they had a little driver?

I know that games often used custom drivers for software mixing to get more channels. The Turrican games (which have really outrageously good music) use a 7-channel system with four of the software channels being mixed into one of the hardware channels.

It was probably a good trade-off to only split one or two of the channels, since you might not need full 8-bit sample resolution for all instruments.

I'm pretty sure Jason Page's driver for the Graftgold games did something similar.

The key point is that when using four tracks, the CPU basically just needed to tell the hardware where in memory a sample was, what frequency to play it at, and how long to go for, and then the hardware would just play it over DMA with no CPU time needed. That's eminently compatible with simultaneously running a game that requires about as much CPU power as the system has available.

Once you start going in to more than four channels, you suddenly start needing to do the mixing in the CPU instead. I remember my original Amiga 500 was capable of only doing 7 channels using OctaMED (six mixed into three, and one native), so the CPU load of mixing was significant. That is why it generally wasn't possible to use more than four channels in games.

Of course, once a bit more CPU power was available, doing the mixing in the CPU became no longer a problem.

One MP3 player used a neat trick for playing sound at better than 8-bit resolution. It would play the more significant bits one one channel, then set the volume of another channel (on the same side) lower and play the least significant bits on that channel, and the hardware would keep them in absolute lock-step. (And obviously do that twice using all four channels for stereo output.)

>Once you start going in to more than four channels, you suddenly start needing to do the mixing in the CPU instead. I remember my original Amiga 500 was capable of only doing 7 channels using OctaMED (six mixed into three, and one native), so the CPU load of mixing was significant. That is why it generally wasn't possible to use more than four channels in games.

A basic A500 can definitely handle 8ch (not just 7) on OctaMED, but not in "HQ" mode.

>octaMED music in games

Yes, there was a player library, easy to use and all.

But the reason octamed was not popular in games nor demoscene is simply because it was optimized for quality and offered costly effects with high cpu usage, unlike e.g. protracker.

Cannon Fodder on PC used the same MODs as the Amiga version for its music. Dr. Awesome from the scene was Team 17's in-house composer for ages. Epic Pinball also used some kind of module format. I think maybe Scream Tracker 3, seeming to remember FastTracker 2 .xm wasn't out yet? But it's not a reliable memory these days...

edit: Unreal Tournament DEFINITELY used some 8-or-more channel module format as well

That's why I wrote "on the original Amiga" - although you could probably make it work if you were willing to sacrifice a bit more of those precious CPU cycles for the audio. On 32 bit PCs, especially those powerful enough to run a 3D game, that wasn't a problem of course...

I believe that Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret used MODs for music.

Terminal Velocity was a native PC game with MOD soundtrack.

Awesome, here an open source complete tracker to play with. It’s fully browser optimized.

https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/

Wow, it has a lot of tracks to load.

Some of these Amiga tracks are so damn upbeat. Love it.

Works great on the phone as well.

If anyone wants to run protracker like back in the day but on current hardware, there’s this neat clone https://github.com/8bitbubsy/pt2-clone

N if you are looking for mods there's always the amazing modarchive.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230903170856/https://modarchiv...

I'm providing the live as a webarchive cache as modarchive.org is on a sight budget and I don't know if they can handle a ton of traffic. Amazing site for spelunking through both vintage and nostalgic tracks.

There's also Aminet:

https://aminet.net/tree?path=mods

Here is a legendary modfile which we still listen to in 2023 [0][1]

[0], 1995 Raver's Megamix by Dax, http://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&que...

[1], Youtube render, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtI-N0SDfUw

I'll add these two classics:

Jesus On E's https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MjNsNW8DvM

State of The Art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89wq5EoXy-0

Revsision 2019 Amiga Demo Compo, which is your favourite?

[0], https://youtu.be/zwoyfH7TgEQ?si=WMTwvh4QliFHhE42

Musically, none of these are quite my cup of tea.. so instead of forcing myself to pick one regardless, here's my favorite ch00n from Revision 2020 :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyxVKZKwBmU

I'm just a sucker for sync, hah. 2019 was an absolutely stellar year for Amiga demos, no doubt! But in my heart of hearts, I like simple things the most.

Oh, and how could I forget Technological Death!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-hUJ-v0FLE

In hindsight it's amazing to me how many of these demos little me saw the year they came out, just via swapping with other little kids, in this little town with 50k residents in Germany. The good stuff spread like wildfire, and we watched it with curtains drawn and volume maxed.

Then one day the local big honcho warez supplier (he was 13, so basically an adult to us 10-11 year olds) forgot his tool disk with all sorts of stuff on it at my home, I discovered ProTracker and music ripping tools on it, and have never been the same.

He didn't point out but the music videos that he showed at the very beginning were also probably made on the Amiga using VideoToaster

Here's a promo video from the time that also uses tracker made background music bringing it full circle https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fH3keLuj9OI

It's kind of a shame how commodore disappeared. A humble 1980s home computer made all that

"H0ffman" is also a respectable artist still doing live gigs w/ vintage hardware:

https://youtu.be/zVF-GbGHxA8?t=4046

His tunes appear in many "Focus Design" demos.

I've seen him live. Fantastic experience.

EDIT: The last track his him.

Polyend's hardware tracker, called Tracker, is on sale right now.

Milky Tracker, Renoise, and Sun Vox are great software to get started with trackers on your PC

Yeah Renoise is still the Go To tracker on windows/mac today, for its general ease of use and versatility.

And linux. They provide a linux version and it runs great on linux

Groovin in G has some excellent Renoise tutorials and just started a new series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwfnvs5pIcM

If we're talking hardware trackers, def also worth mentioning the Dirtywave M8

Recommendation for an excellent documentary by Ahoy on trackers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw

Loved making S3M mods in the early 90’s, fun and educational for a kid interested in making music.

What's great about tracker music is that it's in source format, readable, editable and remixable as if you were the original author.

Open source music! Great for learning.

Yeah, that was a nice side effect - but only a side effect. The real reason why the music was released in this format was space saving. If you would have wanted to release a song with all the tracks already mixed together, you would have had to store it as an uncompressed or losslessly compressed "waveform" file, and a very modest song would already have filled up an Amiga 880 KB floppy disk all by itself. Contrast this to Lemmings, which had not only ~10 songs, but also the sound effects, graphics, game code and 120 levels (although some levels were 100% identical to earlier levels, just with a tougher distribution of Lemmings skills and/or higher quota of Lemmings to save) on 2 floppies...

Object based audio... but 30 years earlier.

I had so much fun replacing all the samples of my favorite mods.

Love trackers! A lot of my friends got their start in music in the mod scene - was a magical time of free original music making and sharing on BBSs/early internet. It’s amazing what people created with 4 channels and 8 bit samples on amigas (and a couple of years later with more channels and 16bits on PCs and cheap sound cards)

-dharma/mono211

Some other interesting amiga music related stuff, made today:

A bit more hardware with an Amiga 1000:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV1McEtejxo

These guys DJing mods with amigas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn9Ks6OA3iU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvP08ezbicU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olHntLXMkCY

Note that they're still used today.

if you want to keep going down the youtube rabbit hole...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDn7ZDcx9w0

Probably the biggest reasons I think they still get used today:

- Really good for breakbeat chopping as they essentially put samples front and centre with the tools to do that. If you check out renoise the first tutorials are about that, but we're talking about octamed etc here...

- I hear a lot of people on music production chat seeking that 'bitcrushed' sampling sound and while you can definitely emulate it using other stuff it's definitely not the same as the entire damn song getting bitcrushed into an 8-bit .MOD file (Or whatever it is you're playing through it - perhaps it's controlling some crisp sounding midi synths and you're good with say bitcrushed vocals and percussion) and I think that has some appeal

- they look cool

I follow a few of these artists, @deatonchrisanthony on instagram has been posting some fun videos

Another big reason is that the limitations actually make you more creative. I learned producing EDM in the FL Studio era and in a sense it's a godsend you don't have to buy all that expensive hardware. On the other hand modern DAWs give you so much freedom its somewhat exhausting. The entry level to produce technical genres like DnB are extremely high nowadays.

This is it right here. Limitations and being able to wrap your head around every piece of the tool you’re using. It’s so easy to get lost in tools like Ableton. They can put you in a headspace that is always fiddling and not actually focused on making music. I think modular gear does this to people too. My friends that go down the modular rabbit hole sometimes don’t realize they haven’t made anything but bloops with their 10,000+ modular. And not in an awesome Autechre/Richard Devine way that has structure and a goal.

Some modular synth producers I've seen like venetian snares use renoise to pull it all together [1]

Aphex has had some things to say about it too although for 'vordhosbn' at least it sounds like he's been more happy with a program I never heard of until now called Playerpro [2] [3]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBaKOcuNTYs

[1] https://imgur.com/a/eofh5

[3] https://forum.renoise.com/t/anyone-who-likes-aphex-twin-and-...

And there is a niche of people using set of two Amigas as dj decks and mixing tracker tunes between them. I absolutely love it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvP08ezbicU

Also shout-out to Retro Ahoy´s awesome documentary on trackers, which covers the amiga quite a bit as well: https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw

Had a “Perfect Sound” and audio master 3. Nothing beats that first burp recording & playback at different speeds when you are 12 :)

Med and Octamed were my favorite tracking tools, Octamed still exists today on windows (never tried it but here : https://archive.org/details/med-soundstudio-v2.1

Amiga version https://archive.org/details/octa-med-v-5.00c

Uraban Shakedown, some justice was the one to watch. Just using 2 Amiga 500's and a Consumer sampler (pretty much) they got into the top 10 in the UK.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L36m5sobhOE

(I think maybe Aphrodite's genius with the beatz had something to do with it).

I've got an Amiga 600 + Sterio Master Sampler + External Midi box etc. for sale if anyone is interested? - if the price is right..

Long shot, but I remember a friend playing a beautiful digital tune made with a tracker from an Amiga demo. I remember the chorus had a sampled voice saying something like "Amphora" (which was probably the name of the demo authors' group). I've searched the internet far and wide but I never found it again. Does anyone remember it?

Do you recall what genre the tune was? Give us bit more to work with :)

I remember it was hard-core techno with heavy basses and short spoken vocals intermixed. Very good quality, more on the "real music production" than on the "videogame track" side of things. Year might have been roughly 1993 to 1996

Show me your favorite modern 4 channel modules that blow your mind! Other than just about anything by h0ffmann, here's a fav of mine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFor3PDA8EI

Jester - Stardust Memories https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLMhBE99byM

Jester - Stardust Otamatonies https://youtu.be/dfFVxWEwhI0?si=r-ZtYmgF1ADp0k8e

Aaaaahhh, Jester. Barely understanding English but feeling that "fuck reputation!" so much, even as a little kid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew3Jd87Sg6c

Knew this would be ctrix before clicking on the link. Awesome dude.

I remember I had Octamed - 8 tracks! Bliss.

This is pure gold. The Amiga was such ahead in the game... then we had 10 years of PC dark ages.

if you want to easily get started with tracker on your PC (windows) there is the free Modplug Tracker !

I like to use XMP on linux to listen to folders of MODS. They are easy to get hold of these days!

And nice vibes from the music as well. Good taste on those vinyls :-)

Something kind of fun about the scene at the time, since it was mostly just kids messing around on their computers, is there are a fair number of pretty interesting remixes of popular songs from the time.

Jabdah - by Lizardking - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

Never Ending Story - Lizardking - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

Take on Me - a bunch of versions - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=search&query=take+o...

Groove is in the Heart - anchoret.sae - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

Like a Virgin - sie - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

Enjoy the Silence - 4-mat - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

Some other stuff I liked from that time (often post-MOD file XM, S3M, or IT style tracked music)

Lizardking (most of his stuff is amazing and he's credited with inventing a genre or music really only heard in trackers called "doskpop") - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules...

Dr. Awesome - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules...

I recommend 12th Warrior - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

elblanco (apparently still active?) - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules...

Recommend "Living, again and again" - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_by_moduleid&qu...

Necros - https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=view_artist_modules...

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