40 years of Amiga: The music machine for the desktop
For the first time, you could create your own real-sounding songs on a computer – The Amiga made it possible. It was also the nucleus of the tracker culture.
This article concludes our three-part series on 40 years of the Amiga. Previously, we published articles on the history and architecture of the Amiga and on the Amiga as a gaming machine.
The Commodore Amiga offered powerful sound hardware for the time and the right programs made it easy to compose your own songs. While the Atari ST, with its midi interface, was an inexpensive computer solution for the music studio, the Amiga was the nucleus of many musicians at home. And this was purely via on-board resources: all you needed was the right tool for composing. We take a look at the trackers and how they still influence the music scene today.
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In 1985, music on the computer – as it is ubiquitous today – was completely unthinkable. Powerful compressions such as MP3 were still a thing of the future and even their storage requirements were still beyond the usual storage space of a floppy disk at the time. Nevertheless, there was a way to produce high-quality tracks with low memory consumption: the tracker modules. With the right program, good pieces of music only depended on your own skills. Stored as so-called "MODs", the music tracks enabled high-quality music on the one hand and low memory requirements on the other. The typical sound of the mods, such as "Modules", is still popular today and also had a significant influence on the demo scene. The trackers made their debut on the Amiga.
Amiga sound chip with possibilities of once expensive synthesizers
As part of the custom chips, Paula was responsible for the sound output on the Amiga. It offered four sound channels, each of which could output samples in 8-bit resolution and at 28 kilohertz. This was not really CD quality, but more than most of the computer competition could offer. And for comparison: just a few years earlier, you had to pay 25,000 US dollars for the Fairlight CMI II digital synthesizer with a similar sampling performance.
(Image:Â CC BY-SA 4.0, Seanriddle)
In an interview with the author, Amiga sound guru Chris HĂĽlsbeck once commented on the relevance of the Paula chip, saying that although the C64's SID chip always had a big place in his heart, the Amiga chip opened up completely new creative possibilities. HĂĽlsbeck programmed his own music program called TFMX on the Amiga, which was also used to create the legendary Turrican soundtracks. However, the breakthrough of the tracker standard was achieved by programmer Karsten Obarski, albeit not entirely voluntarily.
Obarski contributed the music for the breakout clone Amegas in 1987. He also wrote his own tracker program, which was based on concepts similar to Chris HĂĽlsbeck's "Soundmonitor" on the C64, which had a similar concept.
Modules as space-saving music for games and demos
The big advantage of tracker songs was that you only needed individual short samples, which were rasterized in time and varied in pitch. These were placed in patterns, one for each sound channel, and could be used to create high-quality songs with little effort and memory requirements. This resulted in "The Ultimate Soundtracker." In four patterns or virtual sound tracks called "Melody," "Accompany," "Bass," and "Percussions," you could add the individual samples and edit them using many parameters. The names of the tracks were just placeholders, you could use whatever you wanted. This allowed you to create your own songs without much music or programming knowledge, which could also be easily integrated into demos or games. The trick for little storage space on floppy disks and in the main memory: the notes hardly take up any space and each sample is only saved once.
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However, the Soundtracker was not a commercial success: for one thing, the program was not error-free and initially took some getting used to –. The trade press preferred programs such as "Aegis Sonix" or the"Deluxe Music Construction Set", which required a basic knowledge of sheet music. On the other hand, word of the new revolutionary concept spread quickly in the scene. Demo groups reverse-engineered the Ultimate Soundtracker, improved it and re-released it under their own name. This resulted in programs such as Protracker, Noisetracker, Startracker and many other variants, most of which were distributed free of charge – without mentioning the original inventor Karsten Obarski.
(Image:Â CC BY-SA 4.0, Javier Perez Montes)
The samples were distributed with the trackers on floppy disks numbered ST-01, ST-02 and so on. They contained digitized samples of various musical instruments. With the appropriate additional hardware, you could also digitize them yourself, or you could find them in the memory or in the game files.
Over time, this led to the MOD format becoming the standard in both the games industry and the demo scene. The MOD format was so simple and flexible that it was also used on the PC. Better graphics and sound cards made PCs increasingly interesting for demos in the early 1990s.
MODs can not only be played from start to finish, but also in loops, which the program can change again and again. This is ideal for adapting the sound to the display on the screen. A particularly good example is the demo "Second Reality" by the Future Crew, which caused quite a stir in 1993: it looked and sounded like good mega demos on the Amiga.
