English Amiga Board - View Single Post - Wishlist for features of another Amiga music tracker

no9 · 15 March 2021, 12:58

As was discussed in another thread it looks like we got used to good old Protracker. It’s good, good enough to create great music on the Amiga, but clearly it doesn’t utilize all Amiga features. And definitely does not push Amiga to the limits. There are a plenty trackers that offer more than 4 voices but usually at the expense of a heavy CPU footprint which is just too much of a burden for our beloved grandma A500. There are also good trackers that let us use synthesized sounds (realtime and/or prerendered ones), and some other ideas that don’t come to my mind at the moment. But at the end of the day all those ideas are scattered around, but not integrated into a single program that would unleash yet unknown creativity powers that are still hidden in low end Amigas. Wouldn’t this be great to gather all those findings and developments into a single Amiga tracker? One to rule them all.

This is what I would love to hear from you: the ideas that are musically interesting to expand the Amiga sound palette with one assumption: we would not take over this old MC68000 completely, because we know that coders are greedy beasts and they are not eager to spare too much cycles for the music. They need them for their dots, bobs, vectors and other blinking shit... But seriously, together we can theorize about features that are potentially possible. Maybe it will inspire some Amiga coder looking for new challenges. I’m not a coder myself so forgive me my silliness but correct me fiercely when needed.

I collected some ideas here, also inspired by other discussions:

Paul van der Valk, he definitely was doing something fresh in 1989 that in 2021 we would consider… “fresh”? I’m just guessing but doesn’t he modulate sounds in memory “inplace”? [ Show youtube player ]
If so, then Protracker had its attempt with it’s infamous EFx command. This was a good direction but execution was unfortunate, hardly predictable. But if there was a way to control this kind of modulation chipunes might sound… different? A bit.
Sound synthesis: AHX and Pretracker by Pink/Abyss are epic but there is a but… no samples allowed . I respect that, and I would love to steal at least some of his ideas.
AmigaKlang is great, could we have this integrated into a tracker that generates data at module load? I believe so.
Bytebeat approach, to generate sounds with rather short formulas. Very nerdish one, no everyone would like this but I believe that with a custom instruments sounds musicians could share their (secret) formulas to get interesting sounds out of it. Look for “?” button there:
Realtime loop points adjusting - in Protracker we have it fixed. Not sure if it is a Paula limitation, but even if we can have changed once in a second, not a frame, this could produce interesting effects. Also ‘preset table’ of predefined pairs of loop point values switchable by pattern command might be useful.
Volume and pitch envelopes - this wold probably save some of composers time. Simple ADSR (or just R) instead of having constantly to write down and clear up those Axx, EAx/EBx, 7XX commands into patterns.
Roondar’s “Audio Mixer for Games” - Rodnars main target are sound effects in games, but this way of multiplying voices is also useful in music. With fixed sample rate we still can have wide range drum sounds, loops and more.
On the other hand if samplerate is not fixed but still seemingly inhuman low quality, it can be musically useful like it is [ Show youtube player ]. Can 68000 music afford for mixing frequency like 4kHz-8kHz? Adjustable?
Instruments, like FastTracker ones, instead of just samples? Not sure if it is so straightforward to code in Amiga but being able to reuse the same sample with different parameters could open some ways to modulate sounds or optimize size.
Utilize Amiga AM/FM interchannel modulation feature.
More than 31 samples and 128kb sample lengths?

Ok, that’s enough for now with this wish list for Santa Claus. I’m sure many of you have more ideas that could push the sound of Amiga modules to a somewhat higher level. Or you have comments why some of those ideas have no merits or are not possible to implement? Any input is welcome.

15 March 2021, 12:58	#1
no9 Registered User Join Date: Feb 2018 Location: Poland Posts: 354	Wishlist for features of another Amiga music tracker As was discussed in another thread it looks like we got used to good old Protracker. It’s good, good enough to create great music on the Amiga, but clearly it doesn’t utilize all Amiga features. And definitely does not push Amiga to the limits. There are a plenty trackers that offer more than 4 voices but usually at the expense of a heavy CPU footprint which is just too much of a burden for our beloved grandma A500. There are also good trackers that let us use synthesized sounds (realtime and/or prerendered ones), and some other ideas that don’t come to my mind at the moment. But at the end of the day all those ideas are scattered around, but not integrated into a single program that would unleash yet unknown creativity powers that are still hidden in low end Amigas. Wouldn’t this be great to gather all those findings and developments into a single Amiga tracker? One to rule them all. This is what I would love to hear from you: the ideas that are musically interesting to expand the Amiga sound palette with one assumption: we would not take over this old MC68000 completely, because we know that coders are greedy beasts and they are not eager to spare too much cycles for the music. They need them for their dots, bobs, vectors and other blinking shit... But seriously, together we can theorize about features that are potentially possible. Maybe it will inspire some Amiga coder looking for new challenges. I’m not a coder myself so forgive me my silliness but correct me fiercely when needed. I collected some ideas here, also inspired by other discussions: Paul van der Valk, he definitely was doing something fresh in 1989 that in 2021 we would consider… “fresh”? I’m just guessing but doesn’t he modulate sounds in memory “inplace”? [ Show youtube player ] If so, then Protracker had its attempt with it’s infamous EFx command. This was a good direction but execution was unfortunate, hardly predictable. But if there was a way to control this kind of modulation chipunes might sound… different? A bit. Sound synthesis: AHX and Pretracker by Pink/Abyss are epic but there is a but… no samples allowed . I respect that, and I would love to steal at least some of his ideas. AmigaKlang is great, could we have this integrated into a tracker that generates data at module load? I believe so. Bytebeat approach, to generate sounds with rather short formulas. Very nerdish one, no everyone would like this but I believe that with a custom instruments sounds musicians could share their (secret) formulas to get interesting sounds out of it. Look for “?” button there: Realtime loop points adjusting - in Protracker we have it fixed. Not sure if it is a Paula limitation, but even if we can have changed once in a second, not a frame, this could produce interesting effects. Also ‘preset table’ of predefined pairs of loop point values switchable by pattern command might be useful. Volume and pitch envelopes - this wold probably save some of composers time. Simple ADSR (or just R) instead of having constantly to write down and clear up those Axx, EAx/EBx, 7XX commands into patterns. Roondar’s “Audio Mixer for Games” - Rodnars main target are sound effects in games, but this way of multiplying voices is also useful in music. With fixed sample rate we still can have wide range drum sounds, loops and more. On the other hand if samplerate is not fixed but still seemingly inhuman low quality, it can be musically useful like it is [ Show youtube player ]. Can 68000 music afford for mixing frequency like 4kHz-8kHz? Adjustable? Instruments, like FastTracker ones, instead of just samples? Not sure if it is so straightforward to code in Amiga but being able to reuse the same sample with different parameters could open some ways to modulate sounds or optimize size. Utilize Amiga AM/FM interchannel modulation feature. More than 31 samples and 128kb sample lengths? Ok, that’s enough for now with this wish list for Santa Claus. I’m sure many of you have more ideas that could push the sound of Amiga modules to a somewhat higher level. Or you have comments why some of those ideas have no merits or are not possible to implement? Any input is welcome. Last edited by no9; 15 March 2021 at 22:14. Reason: fixed typo