SID sound reloaded

Hello fellow CPCists!

I did it again. Some SID stuff. Just some early demo (so far, CPC music has only used around 6% of the AYs capacity)

https://soundcloud.com/carl-carbunckel/arcane

A bientot und tschüß!

I really enjoy listenning your tunes. It's a real pleasure!
Do you work on a new cpc soundtrakker using these sid tunes ?

Thanks for you kind words!

Currently I don't have any plans for a tracker for the AY³ engine, but I am working on something else which might be even better :)

A SID musicdisk for the next Revision's wild compo? :)

That's an utterly far-fetched idea :)

Hey BSC! Can you say me if what we hear is a capture from your Amstrad? Two question in one: is the player already written? It could be nice to have some technical discussions here about that (at least until 10% of our mental capacities)...

Anyway, nice to hear some blips from you!

Salut Hicks. It was a capture from my emulated 6128 (using MacCPC) and yes, the player is kind of complete. I have some additional ideas which had to be PUSHed to my TODO-Stack sadly, but I am sure I'll find time to resume work on it soon-ish.

What kind of discussion do you have in mind?

Fantastic news and great demo!

So, what is your even better idea?

I have written a generator in Python which converts Soundtrakker tunes into the AY³ format. The instruments
can't be re-used as is (and noise is not supported - I have some ideas and plans to add support for digidrums), so each
tune to convert needs a configuration where ST instruments are mapped to AY³ waveforms. I have made a few more examples ready which sound really good (to me), but I am hesistant to make more previews. I want to release somethings at the next Revision and don't want to spoil the tension of anticipation for anyone including me. I am also planning to open-source everything after Revision. And I have more ideas for variantions of the engine, like toggling the AY voices using register 7 to obtain classic SID effects on all 3 channels.

And I got hold of a M4 module so I can test on a real CPC 6128. I will probably record one more demo from my CPC soonish. I think it sounds a bit better (more analogue and less harsh) on the real hardware.

I love you BSC!!

Sweet, but you'll have a hard time to interpret Python on a Schneider.

I am using FutureOS, which was built with compatibility with everything, right from the start ;-)

Another idea I recently had was a ST to AyAy-Kaeppttn converter. More on this soon(ish) ..

Here's another preview:

https://soundcloud.com/carl-carbunckel/arcane-preview-ii

plus some technical details in the description for those inclined.

Great! I am very inclined! I guess the sine eats up much more CPU, or is it a simili-sine?

It's actually no sine at all cos I uploaded the wrong file :-O .. Those are all sawtooth waves. But the sine wave does not need more CPU than any other wave form, all of them are micro samples of the same size and need the same amount of processing. But you are probably right calling it a simili-sine, as it is stored as a 6.4 bit sample.

Here we go again!

https://soundcloud.com/carl-carbunckel/cpcsid-arcane-preview-iii

This one uses different wave forms (as promised in the last preview): sine, saw-tooth and square with sweeping pulse width.

Recorded directly from a real CPC 6128, no processing other than normalization was applied.

And merry xmas to those inclined :D

Sweet! That's one half step for a man, but a giant blip for mankind.

So, AY³ = the player interleaved with sample restitution? How different is the format compared to STK128?

By the way, what is the history behind 'arcane'?

Thanks madram, good to see at least one guy interested ;) The CPC wiki forum seems infested with hardware geeks :-(

The AY³ player is basically the AYAY engine tripled, but only the sample playing part of it. It mixes three virtual voices into one (I think the mod players from the past worked like this), but instead of mixing full samples, I am using micro samples, as in AYAY. The built-in oscillators are silent (they can't play sine nor sawtooth nor anything else cool, so...), but they could be used to add some noise in the future.

Arcane is just a tune which I always liked and which sounds pretty cool on the C64 so I used this for the first tests and here it is.

At least 2 ;)

Even though I'm not a musician, I follow with a lot of interest your experiments!

Right, what about the data structure (patterns, instruments, ...?).

Did you know arcane from 82 Ditties?

The data structure (generated by the python script I mentioned) is kind of a stream of sound events (wave forms, frequencies, duration), but with an extra lookup step to prevent redundancies. I am currently in contact with one of the guys who wrote a fantastic SID engine on the Enterprise (also ported to the Speccy and the CPC recently), they had some really clever ideas. I might inherit one or two of 'em.

I have never heard of the 82 Ditties before. My first encounter with the Arcane tune was in the late 80s on the Amiga: https://demozoo.org/music/155207/


That's why the name stuck, even though it's originally called Last Hero. Made by Future Freak.

The other day I stumbled upon a quite cool tracker written in Javascript (open source!). I was wondering if people would like to have one targeting the CPC, including AYAY Kaeppttn and AYcubed stuff. Maybe also Lacarree features. Maybe-maybe Starkos stuff. It should be open source. Maybe we CPC music afficionados should work together instead of being like Gollum :-D