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Author Topic: A little dip into the old-school tracking  (Read 105676 times)

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Saga Musix

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Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking
« Reply #10 on: December 12, 2008, 13:12:50 »

Quote
So MIDI music is controlled by a part of DirectX no matter what sound card do you have?
no. just as long as your soundcard has no own wavetable (and most soundcards don't have one), the wavetable emulation jumps in. SoundBlasters are maybe one of the only mainstream soundcard series which still can use their own soundfonts, but I don't think that this is handled on the hardware.
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Oliwerko

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Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking
« Reply #11 on: December 12, 2008, 20:22:34 »

So the wavetable is actually some kind of storage of ready-made waveforms that are combined and modified to produce sound? That's how modern sound cards work?

And are the differences between emulated SID and real SID (like the ones from HardSID or HyperSID) big? Or is it more or less just for the die-hard people hearing every little difference?

I know I have probably too many questions, but the info I've found on the internet is either very in-depth or detail-less. I really enjoy reading what you write me here. Thanks, really.
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Saga Musix

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Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking
« Reply #12 on: December 12, 2008, 20:52:48 »

Quote
So the wavetable is actually some kind of storage of ready-made waveforms that are combined and modified to produce sound? That's how modern sound cards work?
as i said, no. it doesn't work like that anymore, because more advanced techology is used now that we have enough space for mp3 and ogg and whatever. it was common to use a wavetable, but nowadays, noone really uses it anymore.

Quote
And are the differences between emulated SID and real SID (like the ones from HardSID or HyperSID) big? Or is it more or less just for the die-hard people hearing every little difference?
That really, really depends on your emulator. Some are good (libsidplay2 and similar stuff), some are just utter crap (littlesid or whatever it was called).
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Oliwerko

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Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking
« Reply #13 on: December 14, 2008, 09:51:36 »

So the sound equipment worked in this order:
Real-time synthesis (SID), Sample-based (Paula), FM synthesis (SoundBlaster), Wavetable synthesis (Ultrasound), and now we have modern soundcards using some of these plus some modern technologies like DSP?
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raina

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Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking
« Reply #14 on: December 14, 2008, 13:12:33 »

Sound Blasters also had a digital channel, later two for stereo. And the Ultrasound was able to play any digital sounds on its 32 hardware channels (14 at CD quality), not just a MIDI preset bank. Sound Blaster AWE cards took wavetable synthesis further by supporting soundfonts (GUS's .PAT patch format is simpler and closer to to Fasttracker II .XI instruments).

But generally you're right, that's about how it was for consumer hardware before. And you shouldn't forget the other, competing or just different machines of each era. It's interesting stuff.

Nowadays it isn't about sound cards, it's about software. When the computers themselves became powerful enough to handle sound processing while still being able to handle game graphics or application multitasking, sound hardware became less important. (And interestingly, at about the same time they were starting to outsource graphics to so called 3D accelerator display daughter boards. Later the functionality was integrated with the actual graphics adapter eventually making it one of the top-3 most important components when talking about PC performance.)

Of course hardware still matters to prosumers and musicians but keeping in canon with the thread topic, the demoscene and tracking began on consumer hardware, the most widespread machine automatically having the largest potential reserve of sceners around.
« Last Edit: December 14, 2008, 13:18:20 by raina »
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Saga Musix

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Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking
« Reply #15 on: December 14, 2008, 15:40:28 »

You may also be interested in the article "phonomenal" by crossfire designs which covers a whole lot of the "musical history" of IBM computers.
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Oliwerko

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Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking
« Reply #16 on: December 14, 2008, 16:11:26 »

Thanks for the extensive info, I really appreciate it, gonna read some more on wiki  ;D

Anyway,
what re-creation ways of SID and Amiga sound do you recommend?
I've found out that for SID, one option is to buy a HW real SID (HardSID or HyperSID?), the other option may be a software synth (I've only found QuadraSID being said to be the best one out there).

And for Amiga sounds, what are the limitations again?
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raina

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Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking
« Reply #17 on: December 14, 2008, 22:20:00 »

You may also be interested in the article "phonomenal" by crossfire designs which covers a whole lot of the "musical history" of IBM computers.

Seems like a nice read, thanks saga. Bookmarked!

Saga Musix

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Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking
« Reply #18 on: December 15, 2008, 15:23:04 »

You're welcome. The article is really worth reading, that's why I've also linked it on one of my websites.
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Oliwerko

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Re: A little dip into the old-school tracking
« Reply #19 on: December 15, 2008, 20:05:43 »

Yay!
That will surely consume much of my time in next few days  ;D

Thx
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