[HN Gopher] Amiga Samplers: Budget dance music in 1990
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Amiga Samplers: Budget dance music in 1990
Author : bane
Score : 224 points
Date : 2023-09-04 02:48 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| bane wrote:
| 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...
| janesconference wrote:
| 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?
| ilkke wrote:
| Do you recall what genre the tune was? Give us bit more to work
| with :)
| janesconference wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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
| johnnyworker wrote:
| 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
| meindnoch wrote:
| Jester - Stardust Memories
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLMhBE99byM
| mzerod wrote:
| Jester - Stardust Otamatonies
| https://youtu.be/dfFVxWEwhI0?si=r-ZtYmgF1ADp0k8e
| johnnyworker wrote:
| Aaaaahhh, Jester. Barely understanding English but feeling
| that "fuck reputation!" so much, even as a little kid.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ew3Jd87Sg6c
| dharma1 wrote:
| 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
| dm319 wrote:
| I like to use XMP on linux to listen to folders of MODS. They are
| easy to get hold of these days!
| pavlov wrote:
| 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.
| sillywalk wrote:
| I believe that Crusader: No Remorse and No Regret used MODs for
| music.
| kreddor wrote:
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| A little later, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, and Deus Ex all
| used tracker music, to enduring acclaim.
| badpun wrote:
| 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).
| rob74 wrote:
| 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.
| vintermann wrote:
| 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.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| 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.)
| selcuka wrote:
| > I think Lemmings used MODs too
|
| Lemmings was originally published for Amiga, so that decision
| makes sense.
| amiga386 wrote:
| 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.
| rob74 wrote:
| 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.
| porbelm wrote:
| 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
| rob74 wrote:
| 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...
| amiga386 wrote:
| 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...
| jahnu wrote:
| OctaMED was mind blowing. So many hours of joy spent on that.
| 123pie123 wrote:
| 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
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| 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
| keyle wrote:
| Yeah Renoise is still the Go To tracker on windows/mac today,
| for its general ease of use and versatility.
| awuji wrote:
| And linux. They provide a linux version and it runs great on
| linux
| ilkke wrote:
| If we're talking hardware trackers, def also worth mentioning
| the Dirtywave M8
| kubov wrote:
| Groovin in G has some excellent Renoise tutorials and just
| started a new series:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwfnvs5pIcM
| _joel wrote:
| Knew this would be ctrix before clicking on the link. Awesome
| dude.
| joehogans wrote:
| Awesome, here an open source complete tracker to play with. It's
| fully browser optimized.
|
| https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Wow, it has a lot of tracks to load.
|
| Some of these Amiga tracks are so damn upbeat. Love it.
| outofpaper wrote:
| 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.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| There's also Aminet:
|
| https://aminet.net/tree?path=mods
| pjmlp wrote:
| Works great on the phone as well.
| blaerk wrote:
| 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
| Annatar wrote:
| [dead]
| chaosprint wrote:
| 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
| porkbeer wrote:
| A good modern tracker is Renoise. It has modern plugin support,
| runs on most OSs and is still being developed.
| keyle wrote:
| 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
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| 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
| EmilyHughes wrote:
| 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.
| spacemadness wrote:
| 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.
| kubov wrote:
| 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
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| "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.
| dm319 wrote:
| I've seen him live. Fantastic experience.
|
| EDIT: The last track his him.
| beardyw wrote:
| I remember I had Octamed - 8 tracks! Bliss.
| Hackbraten wrote:
| Recommendation for an excellent documentary by Ahoy on trackers:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw
| [deleted]
| ant6n wrote:
| 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
| unixhero wrote:
| 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
| johnnyworker wrote:
| 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
| johnnyworker wrote:
| 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.
| unixhero wrote:
| Revsision 2019 Amiga Demo Compo, which is your favourite?
|
| [0], https://youtu.be/zwoyfH7TgEQ?si=WMTwvh4QliFHhE42
| johnnyworker wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| block_dagger wrote:
| Loved making S3M mods in the early 90's, fun and educational for
| a kid interested in making music.
| geon wrote:
| I had so much fun replacing all the samples of my favorite
| mods.
| vnorilo wrote:
| 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.
| _joel wrote:
| Object based audio... but 30 years earlier.
| rob74 wrote:
| 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...
| boboche wrote:
| 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
| kristopolous wrote:
| 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
| Annatar wrote:
| [dead]
| jahnu wrote:
| 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!
| daneel_w wrote:
| _> "I'll never enjoy computing again as much as I did as a
| teenager with an Amiga 500 ..."_
|
| Same. It really was magic exploration.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| Likewise! What sort of plugins are you making?
| jahnu wrote:
| 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!?
| _joel wrote:
| Nice clean looking plugins, will give them a try tonight
| jahnu wrote:
| 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.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| Nice! Just wondering if you considered using JUCE?
| epcoa wrote:
| The plugins are built with juce v6
| jahnu wrote:
| 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.
| kwanbix wrote:
| Yes, the amiga was so good for it's time.
|
| It is crazy how commodore f*ked up.
| zfxfr wrote:
| if you want to easily get started with tracker on your PC
| (windows) there is the free Modplug Tracker !
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(page generated 2023-09-04 23:02 UTC)