OctaMED

OctaMED is written for the Amiga by Teijo Kinnunen tracker. It loads and plays mod formats ( Soundtracker music modules), but also has its own format: .. Med ( MMD0 -3)

History of development

The first version was released in 1989 under the name MED ( "Music Editor "). In 1990 a version with MIDI support: In addition to the four sample channels of the Amiga multiple MIDI tracks could be inserted over which then could control external synthesizers and samplers. This made it possible to use MED in a semi-professional studio environment. In 1991, then appeared a version under the name OctaMED ( Octa 8 ) with a completely new concept:

For the first time it was possible, by a trick play 8 channels ( 4 stereo ) over the 4 channels of the Amiga: These digitized instruments were halved, mixed and output in the loudness. Track 0 and 2 of the 8- track format so were spent on the hardware channel 0 of the Amigas, lane 1 and 3 on channel 1, and so on. The major qualitative disadvantage of this technique was that you could not use the fine-grained hardware rendering rates for both sounds on a hardware channel. That is, at least had one of the two sounds ( under loss of quality ) on another playback frequency to be converted. In addition, you can quickly met with the use of this trick at the boundaries of the computational power of the Amiga.

Other new features of the ( Octa ) MED - format relative to the de facto standard to become available in the demo and game scene MODs were variable pattern and block lengths and new effects. However, MED was not just thrifty, what the CPU load was concerned; one reason why the MOD format still used in the demo and game scene, and MED mainly ( here in combination with MIDI) was used in "stand -alone" music productions.

Up to version 6 4 sound channels changed the basic principle of the tightly coupled to the Amiga sound system 2 x nothing. By released in 1996, " OctaMED Sound Studio ", however OctaMED was much more efficient with one blow. OctaMED Sound Studio allowed to play up to 64 tracks mixed in real time and were distributed with any stereo spread on the physically available output channels ( so-called " Mixer Mode "). In contrast to the " octa " music now had all the sounds on a single frequency for reproduction ( not a reproduction frequency per track pair) to be converted. Would in principle therefore a bad quality to be expected as in the " octa " music, as opposed to this but you could now use global high sampling rates. For the first time it was possible to transform pieces of music without going through analogue media into audio data, which could be written directly to CD. As output media and 16- bit sound cards now supported (such as the Toccata ) next to the 8- bit sound chip "Paula". This OctaMED Sound Studio was the first tracker music in 16 -bit and 48 kHz could play. There was also a " Paula 14-bit " mode, in which the four 8- bit channels of sound chips were combined into two 14 -bit stereo channels, which enabled a significantly lower noise music quality on standard Amigas.

In addition, the typical Amiga Chip RAM limit was blown up: through the virtualization of the sample channels, it was possible to put the samples into Fast RAM of the Amiga. For the first time it was possible to have more than 2 MB ( maximum size of the DMA -capable chip RAMs) to accommodate samples in a song. The samples were now in 16 -bit, max. 48 kHz and stereo are available. Along with the good MIDI support ( inter alia with very good MIDI sys-ex message skills ) you could with OctaMED Sound Studio from suitably equipped Amiga ( with 68030 for CPU -heavy mix of channels, lots of fast RAM for samples, a 16- bit sound card and MIDI interface ) to build a powerful music workstation.

End of the 90 was initially even by Teijo Kinnunen, the Windows version, which was functionally identical to OctaMED sound studio, but was not particularly error-free programs. Since then dragged the development of the tracker and from OctaMED was MED Sound Studio. In the years up to now (2006 ) a large number of programmers tried in the project of RBF Software ( the English sales since the Amiga days ) without any noticeable progress.

With the current version 1.7, which functionally not very different from the first version of Windows, the development of MED Sound Studio seems to be asleep throughout. According to announcements of RBF software is supposedly working on version 2. A publication of this version, however, is due to a variety of announcements regarding a development by RBF software, more than likely.

Also for the Amiga, there should be a version 2 and a trial was also short time available. But here seems absolutely lie idle development.

Meanwhile, the time MED Sound Studio has been surpassed. Professional trackers, including with excellent MIDI support, are numerous for PC and MAC available (eg Renoise, Aodix, MadTracker, Jeskola Buzz ).