Bringing the Amiga Sample Library into the 21st Century
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- Опубліковано 2 сер 2024
- Get the Amigatakt Pack here: redmeansrecording.gumroad.com...
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Sources in order of appearance in the video:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_1000
• The Ultimate Soundtrac...
• Amiga Demoscene Origin...
archive.org/details/90s-sampl...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_O...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimat...
www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php?...
• #Amiga #Music - #Turri...
• Battle Squadron -= Am...
• Amiga music: Hybris (m...
• Agony (Amiga) - comple...
• Golden Axe Amiga Music...
demozoo.org/groups/28634/
• Mekka+Symposium MS2K-1...
• Two women that changed...
archive.org/details/softwarel...
archive.org/details/softwarel...
• Live Chiptune Performa...
• The Party 1991 (Amiga ...
• The Party 1991 (Amiga ...
• Revision 2023 - Music ...
• Future Crew - Second R...
ada.untergrund.net/
00:00 intro
01:00 what are the samples?
02:25 the amiga
03:41 karsten and soundtracker
05:56 the amigatakt pack
07:19 the demoscene
09:25 some other cool links
09:56 outro
Hey all! I knew I was gonna get some stuff wrong in this regardless of my research, so here are some corrections:
The Amiga was not Commodore's first personal computer! Dunno how I messed that up looking at Wikipedia.
The Paula Chip was apparently NOT able to generate waveforms.
The Turrican II soundtrack did not use Soundtracker for its music, instead it used TFMX.
Please leave your corrections here!
Here's a link to the Amiga ST disks as Wavs: archive.org/details/AmigaSTXX_originals_plus_conversions
Fantastic video you put together here, thank you! Just a small question: can we listen to your intro music somewhere? (it's not in the description) :)
It couldn’t generate waveforms, but if you gave it single wave cycles it could AM or FM them together and output the result 👍 (well, it could do that for any sample - but it’s synth-head predictable with single waves!)
The Paula chip couldn’t pan iirc. Two channels went left (1 and 3 i have a faint memory) and the others right.
Demos are awesome, but for me it has to be cracktros! Look it up!
Oh, btw, check out a software called octamed for amiga. Could do 8 channels + midi!!! ❤
@@apatoa3513 so much so almost every Amiga musician bought a box to blend them together and make the separation less intense 😅
I would have watched an hour long version of this video.
Same here!
I assume you’ve already seen Ahoy’s video from a few years ago? :)
@@kaitlyn__L I haven’t! I’ll check it out, though. Thanks!
Same. But i’m also glad there’s now a short version I can send to people that are new to it. :)
@@neelshivI did one too, that’s 30 minutes long 😊
Just a little nitpick: Turrican 2 soundtrack was not made with one of the original soundtrackers. The master himself, Chris Hülsbeck, wrote his own TFMX tracker/sound system, squeezing in 7 tracks instead of four. Still my favorite game soundtrack to date.
I've been curious, why it was it 7 and not 8, like OctaMED? 2 for each channel? did it work differently somehow?
@@zaxolotl TBH I have no idea. But I suspect it either was too hard on the CPU cycles (the game had to be run, too), or the 4th "un-shared" channel was used for game sounds (shots, explosions) and thus had to react more quickly?
It was seven. It wasn‘t like the original OctaMED, where each physical channel was doubled by mixing two samples each, it was AFAIK mixing four samples into one channel. So those four mixed channels into one physical plus the three remaining physical ones, makes seven. How does it basically work, you ask? Well, Chris Hülsbeck took a page out of the book of another legend of game music, only this time it was one more famous for his Atari ST tracks. As it happens, this guy, I think it was Jochen Hippel, wanted to have tracker sound on the ST, too. You may know that the ST while having no official sample sound can playback digitized sound thru some trickery (similar to the C64). So he wrote a fast mixing routine, to mix four sample channels into one and this one channel is played by that trickery. There you have it, tracker sound on the ST. The routine was obviously fast enough to be used in games without taking up too much CPU power. So Chris Hülsbeck now took this routine and used it on the Amiga. It was probably optimized and simplified, because you don‘t need the whole range of tracker commands if you have other full channels as well.
I haven‘t analyzed the TFMX 7v tracks myself, but my guess would be that drums and bass generally run each over a physical channel, while melody and chords are done on the four mixed channels. This saves some memory, as chords usually are sampled as such, so there‘s a minor sample, a major sample and so on of the same basic sound. This is not needed here because with those additional channels you can simply play the chords with a single note sound. Oh, the last physical channel would be for game sound effects. Except for the out-of-game music like the intro, end theme etc.
@@jensdroessler3575on Amiga Eagle Player's TFMX 7V player routine was able to mute channels (afaik DeliTracker's not), so yes, 4 channels was mixed into one, probably at low rate for A500 cpu power.
@@Martin_Demsky Yes, the routine was reduced to the absolute necessary as far as I know. As said it was first used on the Atari ST which uses the same CPU at slightly higher clock.
The reason the samples sound so high pitched is that the typical sample playback rate was around 8kHz (I remember the specific frequency of 8363Hz, for some reason), which is about two and a half octaves lower (and slower) than 44.1kHz.
That comment had a lot more in it, until I realised how well-researched this video was. The one detail I'll add is that the music playroutines would often take sync data for animations directly from the music patterns (typically with the 8 command that was unused).
Also, hard disagree that the time spent listening these old musicdisks is "wasted"!
I was one of those kids in his bedroom in The late 80s first making music using an Amiga and trackers.
I’m going to download these samples and put them in my Polyend tracker. That’s their most appropriate home.
Despite some inaccuracies -- thanks a lot for covering this topic!
There's something cool about resurrecting the familiar sound of the old Amiga with a modern hardware. Love it!
From the (very) little I was involved in the Amiga music scene I think most of the sample libraries on those disks were built over time by various demo scene musicians/coders but I do not remember ever seeing a particular name claiming any library as their own creation. If memory serves, whenever a new demo/music track came through our P.O. box somebody in my group would rip all the instruments from each tracker mod in the received disk parcels and save them to our sample collection on diskettes. Copies of these disks would later get snail-mailed/swapped with other groups who would then add any new samples from our disks to their collections and vice-versa or to existing st-xx disks, so for a long time many st-xx disk kept evolving and rarely had the same content. My st-01 disk could have been all bass samples but I could get someone else's st-01 disk that could have been their drums or a mix of different instruments. I am assuming the st-xx naming format came from the fact that many started with Sound Tracker and the disk labelling format was "standardised" for ease-of-use or to honour the OG of trackers, the Ultimate Sound Tracker before other tracker names started appearing, like Protracker, NoiseTracker, Octamed etc.
Great content. I couldn’t afford an Amiga, but always circled it in the catalogue.
I used to go over a friend's house and watch him code on one... lol.
Oh wow, awesome! I was a huge Amiga fan back in they day. Had an Amiga 1200 but I was more of a Deluxe Paint IV guy than a tracker guy. This is great.
The amiga 1000 was the first PC by Amiga, but not by Commodore. They released the PET in '77 and I think maybe the C64 was even before the A1000. The Amiga 500 was the first computer owned by me, which is perhaps less culturally significant than any other fact you can say about it, but its still very important. Piracy was king and it was fitting then, that the A500 was gifted to me when I was 10, along with a huge black bin bag of pirated games. When I got old enough to think about it, it became obvious that it had been stolen. At the time it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
That makes sense thanks for context.
Wow. Forgot about that one. I would have pointed to the C128 as Personal Computer released before the Amiga 1000. the C64 (and c16 or VC20) was labeled home computer. Totally forgot about the PET, though. Nice one!
Was about to say the same. We had a C64 and that SID audio chip rocked lol
The history of Amiga Corporation is also pretty interesting. It started out as a company founded by disgruntled ex-Atari engineers, and then got acquired by Commodore, who didn't really know what to do with it, and then later Commodore's CEO left Commodore and bought out Atari.
Yes, it went: Commodore PET (1977), Commodore VIC-20 (1980), Commodore 64 (1982), Commodore Plus/4, 16, and 116 (same platform but different cases and memory configurations: 1984), Commodore 128 (1985), Commodore Amiga (internally, and retroactively named Amiga 1000; 1985).
Obviously there were more models, variants, etc, so the PET has many versions, the 64 has a makeover in 1985-86-ish called the 64c but there were other models like the Aldi (64g), and the 128 also later came in 2 desktop forms the 128D and 128DCR. The Amiga has many variants the 1000 being the first, then in 1987 it was split to the desktop version 2000 and the wedge shaped 500, and it's the Amiga 500 that had the most success.
I am glossing over a lot here and I am probably also missing something but it's a fascinating story. The micros are often called home computers but if you look at an original label on the Commodore 64 it reads: Personal Computer. Well, it does on the 64C. I don't have a breadbin to check. And yes, breadbin is what the earlier model 64s are called.
There is nothing that hits my nostalgia buttons more than Amiga tracks and sounds ❤
I did a 30min vid on Amiga audio if you’re after more nostalgia 😊
To me the most "Amiga" sound was that flat, brassy trumpet which just sounded like a pitched up honking goose. Very lo-fi, slightly bitcrushed, a minor meme on UA-cam as the "skull trumpet" sound. Whenever I think Amiga, I think of that trumpet, as ubiquitous like the DX7 slap bass.
KARSTEN OBARSKI!!!
Legend
5:34 golden axe is actually insane on the C64 (with the sid chip) - its the best version of all (including the arcade)
Thank you for inadvertently sending me on a 30 min sidequest to watch (and listen to) a playthrough of Agony (Psygnosis), which also has amazing loading screen art! It was Lovely!
1:34 the original sample rate for Amiga SoundTracker samples is about 8363 Hz (depending on PAL/NTSC differences)
I absolutely love this and the original video you put together on the Zero G sound files. Just ordered the Amigatakt pack. Thank you for putting it together!
The feeling when I realised that what you found was the ST-discs. Wow!!! I have several of them on floppy’s.
(I’ve had my A1000 since the end of the 80’s and made a lot of music with it. Now I mostly use Bitwig, but sometimes I dig out my old hardware/software.)
“The first personal computer released by Commodore “ 😂😂🤣🤣
Yup, got that one wrong.
Nice work! I was 14 when the Amiga came out and never had one, but I had friends who did, and I couldn't believe the sounds coming out of it.
This is awesome. My cousin and I bonded over the Amiga. Well, it was mostly his stories actually. I was far too young when the whole Amiga scene was happening. I bought my first computer in mid 2000s. But he introduced me to the tracker and lots of interesting ideas around it and the Amiga. Thanks for the flashback mate. Pretty cool :).
Data Airlines has a great compilation album titled ST-FM. It came out in 2017 and used ST-01 and ST-02 packs.
Great work with the video, thank you so much for putting that pack together so others can enjoy the passion of making chiptune style music. The Tracker/Demo scene does not get enough people talking about it. It's an important piece of music history.
2:29 The Amiga was not even remotely Commodore's first personal computer. The PET came out in 1977, the VIC-20 came out in 1980, and the C64 (their most popular ever) was in 1982. The C64 demo scene is also still alive and well, and there's still occasionally VIC-20 demos that are worth watching too (and are technically way more impressive as the VIC-20's chipset is way more primitive).
Incidentally, Bob Yannes, who designed the MOS 6581 (SID) that was used in the C64 and C128, would go on to cofound Ensoniq.
It’s been years since my humble beginnings as an electronic musician using mod trackers
Damn I feel old now😂
I love this. You have a gift for this style of documentary film making. Please continue to make them along with your other content!
Very cool video. Don't lie you immediately sequenced these with the M8! It is pure joy.
Great work with this pack I can tell you indeed had a lot of fun with it and a lot of work too.
Yais! Loved the 90s sample cds vid as much as this one. You present the nostalgic info and feels so concise and entertaining at once. Also I learned utergrund is my new fav word.
This is so rad! Thanks for making this one Jeremy! I didn’t know a bunch of this history, love this style of video
This is awesome, thank you for putting this together!
Amazing content, as always. Happy New Year Jeremy!
love this would love more history essays from you
Fantastic video! I'm getting into the tracker scene, its nice to see some of origins! Thank you for your hard work.
Yup. buying that pack! Another awesome RMR video. Ty Jeremy!!!
Great video - awesome to see people still finding Amiga sound in 2024.
I’m still using my (nowadays numerous) Amigas today.
Very cool, even though it triggers my long dormant Atari ST tribalism just a wee bit.
Fair play, did you watch Benn Jordan's video on brand loyalty?
Video popped up on the Mac as I doing some Cubase file management on my Hatari booting Pi400 and 😂 when I read that as I caught myself going nah a couple times lmao
I still use my 4MB STE. Ridiculously good midi timing. Mostly Notator these days since I lost my Cubase dongle in a move. The Amiga was great for samples and I used both but the Amiga 500 died long ago.
Amazing video, and thank you for all the links to the sources. I'm gonna have a blast listening through the best demo's playlist.
awesome stuff!! love me some tracker music - especially from the Amiga. thanks for the great work
This was so good! Love the mini-doc in the middle :D
Another great video and the pack looks fantastic
I don't typically buy sample packs- but I really love these sounds and really love you as much as I can some dude over the internet. I appreciate all the work you put into these! I just finished the battery mod on my takt so I'm going to sit in bed with 3 pairs of socks on and get nerdy
What a wonderful rabbit hole! Visually stunning video!
Rad! These sounds give off incredible vibes ❤
Excellent work once again. Appreciate you!
Learned a ton watching this. Thank you, Jeremy!! Stay warm this weekend!
i LOVE these types of video from you!
Quality content. Thank you for the education and the hard work put in to the samples created.
I’m pretty sure that Turrican II did not use Soundtracker for its music. Chris Huelsbeck coded TFMX which could mix up to eight channels to create more interesting music.
You're right actually. Just learned this from another comment. I knew I was gonna get something wrong, this is such a specialized subject.
@@RedMeansRecording While most Amiga demos and games used some form of the .mod SoundTracker format, there were3 indeed specialised formats, usually at 'some' CPU cost... so for a game that would use the blitter/sprites for most of its bandwidth, you could afford to run a more demanding sound routine (i.e: realtime bouncing two lofi tracks down to one ). It was a wild west due to hardware restraints, but one thing is for sure; the Amiga reigned supreme for a long time!
Absolutely loved this, would happily watch a huge series of things like this covering other old samples and romplers
i absolutely wanna cover romplers!
Hainbach just did a video on an old kawai home keyboard and now you're doing an Amiga video. Perfect comfort viewing for my brain while I'm laid up with the 'Rona. Given I started my musical explorations (apart from failed guitar and piano lessons) with mod tracking and would continue to use my Amiga in specialized cases even after getting more professional gear (it was excellent for crunchy hardcore gabber, which I did as a joke to conclude a set once) 😊
There were affordable 8 bit samplers (I still remember mine announcing "welcome to sound perfect") so as well as borrowing samples from other mods I'd make my own from CDs and my k3 synthesizer.
I always preferred MED and Octamed to the more well known tracking software as they had additional features such as robust sample editing capabilities and eventually an additional 4 channels of audio that could be played at the expense of CPU
Your story is so similar to mine, even down to your preference for MED and OctaMED. I sampled everything I could find with my Perfect Sound sampler, including my K1m synth. I was so annoyed that I had to buy an Atari 1040ST when I got into professional recording simply because it was the standard for sequencing. The Atari was otherwise a pretty boring computer compared to the Amiga, and I still sometimes wonder what would have happened if they'd released an Amiga version of Cubase.
You’ll likely enjoy my 30 min video on Amiga audio then, where I explore a tonne of obscure Amiga software 😊
There is no "official" Amiga sample library beyond ST-01. ST-01 was the sample set that came with The Ultimate Soundtracker. Anything with a higher number is simply a disk of samples that someone has personally collected, generally by ripping them from games and demos.
Also, Turrican was created with Chris Hülsbeck's own TFMX, Hybris and Battle Squadron were created by Paul Van Der Valk using his own music player, Golden Axe was by David Whitaker using his own player, and Agony was created much later using Noisetracker or Protracker.
Paula's maximum frequency output without tricks was around 28KHz.
Terrific video and great job on the sample pack!
8:21 SHOUT OUT TO TREY FREY
Would have never thought to see a demoscene video today. SO AWESOME!
As somebody who got started on music with trackers, thank you for this! :)
Damn this video is definitely meant for me
Time to use your work to update my old tracks
Your mini-docs kick ass. I love them.
Love Amiga content. Pure nostalgia
this is how i started my first music steps, the soundtracker on amiga :-)
fantastic video! really glad u r posting
Love it jeremy more videos like this 😍
aahmazingue! a warm thank you 😊 i did my first tracks with an amiga 500 running pro tracker ✨
Lovely video editing! ❤
In the past couple years the demoscene has even been recognized by the UN as part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage.
Great work, Jeremy!
Battle Squadron, a banger indeed! To this day I still sometimes listen to it :D
Awesome! Makes me wanna jump into my Lotus Turbo and play Pinball! Really well put together video and demos! 🎶
As far as I can remember ST-01 and ST-02 were the original sample disks. After that, all sorts of distro groups were compiling disks of mainly samples ripped from .mod files as their own packs. Throw in cheap back of magazine public domain shovelware that often had bundles of sample disks and there is a jumbled mess of disks out there...
You're certainly not wrong but there was a particular series of ST disks that remained surprisingly consistent over the years. I had the first 20 of them on floppies back in the day, and they are exactly the same as the first 20 disks in various archives I've come across in the years since, including the most recent one mentioned in this video. I guess it's as close as we have to an 'official' library.
Man... if I could fire up my A500 today....
Fantastic vid Jeremy. Really appreciate the work you've done here.
This video is amazing, could even be a longer documentary. Appreciate everything you do Jeremy! 🤍
Now I want a digitakt. Super cool video. Mad rad
Thanks for the history here - I was an 8086 kid, and I got my start in electronic music with a mod tracker there, and was really into the 8086 demo scene. I knew Amiga was really the heart of all of this, but never bothered to seek out the history of it all.
Trip back to memory lane.
Amiga was my introduction into beatmaking. One of my friends had one and guess where we spent most of our evenings :) :)
I started with fasttracker for Windows, I know, different era, but still the same tracker feeling for me.
(and I embraced the 'unlimited' amount of tracks and basic wave drawing capabilities it had)
Going to hardware stores with my recorder and sampling filter sweeps (hoping nobody would catch me) on their hardware synths so I could replicate those in fasttracker was such a cool experience, giving me 'all' the sounds I needed to make my tracks.
Great video Jeremy!
Cool and good research!
For young people it may be hard to understand but back then being able to play digitized sound on an affordable home computer was a huge step!
Made some mixtapes myself back in the day (still have the parallel port sampler!) on my A500, classmates didn't believe a computer could do that.
Also music disks with popular music of the time like the Digital Concert series and many more was so awesome back in those days.
The later Amiga chipsets (ECS and AGA) had a neat trick that you can put Paula in 14 bit 44.1 Khz mode, combined with a 6db volume boost it still sounds very good even today.
Strange coincident, started two weeks ago to dig into Amiga Jungle music.
whoa!! what's wild is that i downloaded the st-xx archive and discovered the same pitching of the samples a while back! Never really made much with them though but they were fun to play with!
One thing that came to mind in addition to wrong specs on OCS's wrongly documented display modes: you could probably make many of them wavetables. Their lofi in the first place so "Serum size" wavetable could probably fit the essence for many of them. Or something like minifreak... I.e. convert to wavetable and envelope that for playback...
thanks for making this! soooo so good and educational! missing my childhood :)
I did find a voice sample from the commercial game Speedball 2 ("Icecream Icecream ") and sample names starting with populous in this samplepack, so i would not be surprised if a lot of the other disks where samples
from ripped game music as well.
After some more digging, I found Xenon and lemmings as well.
OCS chipset could display 64 colors and even 4096 colors simultaneously in HAM mode.
Nice work! I stumbled across the ST disks last year and did exactly this on my Digitakt - although never considered releasing it as a pack!
I then tried doing the same on my SP-404 mkII and had endless issues getting the samples to play correctly..
2:25 “Amiga 1000 was the first Personal Computer released by Commodore.” Commodore PET says Hi, not to mention Vic-20, C64, on and on. :)
Great Times back then, i've started with protracker and in 1991 with oktalyzer, many greetings from brunswick in germany and please stay safe 🙃
my dog is _very_ interested in the spinning 3d rat at 00:17
Fantastic documentary. Giving me real Ahoy vibes.
Great video! Thanks for sharing :)
Great video. Nice and concise. This was more of a European phenomena so it’s good to see it being covered by a US content creator (the typical US-centric narrative for chiptune etc revolves around the NES and Gameboy and anything outside of that didn’t happen). Amigas were also a very popular with producers in the rave scene of the early 90s here in the UK too.
Oh man... a stroll down memory lane!
Just wanna say that I've always liked your content and your history lesson vids from last year were some of my fav on synthtube. Glad that you're continuing to do them and wish I had a digitakt to buy the pack for. Your last video was brutal to watch (in a good way, vulnerability is badass) and I hope you're doing well. Creators like you make this community a better place.
Great video. Make more like this, I beg!
Solid Gold content right here. ❤
Sick video. I had no idea the capabilities of these older devices. The demoscene kind of explains the popularity in Pure Data / GEM and audio reactivate programming.
this is such a well crafted video through and through
I loved my amiga 500
This is so dope.
This is one of the coolest things I never knew about!
Turrican II was not scored using sound tracker, but using Chris Hulsbeck’s own TFMX which allowed him to mix down 7 voices into the 4 channels. Paula does not generate basic waveforms either. A few bits of fact checking needed, but still a nice video and good job on making some modern sample disks from st01 to st04…
I literally got this from a wiki so I'm frustrated I got it wrong
@@RedMeansRecording The Amiga scene is older than wikis. ;) AmiNet was at for a time, the largest public file repository on the Internet. Chances are, you're not going to get a lot of accurate information on Amigas in 2023, because a lot of us Amiga folks have had to move on. I still have my A1200 and IMHO, consider the Amiga the apogee of personal computing, it's been getting worse ever since.
Great nostalgic video! Cheers! With sample libraries, AMG (advanced media group) in the UK produced some. They’ve been at it since the 80s and have a ridiculous catalog.
Cool! This pack makes me wish i had a DigiTech.