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Amiga Samplers : Budget dance music in 1990

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1.7M views6 years ago2 recommendations

History and cultureGraphics and audioRetro computingAudio and DSPHistory of computing

A demonstration of how to sample audio and create a dance track on an Amiga 500 using 1990s tracker software.

An Amiga 500, Stereo Master and handful of $1 records from a 1990 Sunday market: Can we make a dance track on a budget home computer? Of course! Back when big-name dance tunes required big-budget-gear, a secondhand Amiga let you take the first steps to making a dance-floor banger.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Recommended for its excellent explanation of how early music trackers and samplers worked within tight memory constraints.

uk_programmeron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Someone Is Stealing Tracker Songs and Selling Them”

There is a great video on youtube that explains how it all works. link to this video He gets into the explanation of how the tracker software works about 8min 30seconds in. Typically though if you got a cracked game at that time it would have the crackers group name and there would be a little graphical demo and some tracker music.

aasasdon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Renoise – A DAW with a tracker-like interface”

Here's a good recap of what sampling looked like in the time of Amiga: link to this video “Ta-da-da-da... aaaaaaand we're out of memory.” Likewise apparently DJ Shadow pulled off quite a feat with his Akai MPC60 on ‘Endtroducing’, because the sampler could store something like twelve samples, also not too long. A sorta related anecdote is how the British ‘mind the gap’ was this terse because it was recorded on a solid-state memory, costing dearly in '68 even for the small amount by today's standards.

aasasdon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Trackers: The Sound of 16-Bit [video]”

Don't forget to use a sampler to grab sounds for the tracker: link to this video > “Ta-da-da-daa”... aaaaand we're out of memory.

aasasdon Hacker News • Mentions

On “When hits were stored on floppy disk and created with an Atari ST (2020)”

Here's also a demonstration of using a sampler and a tracker with an Amiga, all from around 1990: link to this video “Aaaand we're out of memory.” (There's also the humor of sampling Coldcut, who themselves were wizards of audiovisual sampling, at least for their time.)

mastazion Hacker News • Mentions

On “When hits were stored on floppy disk and created with an Atari ST (2020)”

This is what I remember from those times: if you had external gear (synth, sampler etc.) then the Atari was your best bet because of the built-in MIDI ports1 and consequently having a good ecosystem in terms of MIDI sequencers. (Cubase, for example, was available for ST)2. If you didn't have external gear, then you would go for Amiga (maybe using a cheap Amiga sampler interface3, and a music tracker4 as the software) due to the fact that Amiga had better onboard audio, courtesy of Paula5. (IIRC, it wasn't until the Falcon that Atari caught up with Amiga in terms of onboard audio). 1 link 2 link 3 link to this video 4 link 5 link

mastazion Hacker News • Mentions

On “‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music”

…to sample on the Amiga, you actually needed one external piece of hardware: an audio sampling interface, however these were generally very cheap 3 Just a few hours ago an article about making music on the Atari ST made it to the HN home page (I also commented there), might be an interesting read for those interested 4 1 link 2 link 3 link to this video 4 link…

mastazion Hacker News • Mentions

On “‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music”

…ill a way cheaper option than e.g. an Atari ST + MIDI-connected stand-alone sampler. Also we have to consider that there were sample libraries distributed on floppy - so with an Amiga you could still have "cool sounds" even without a sampler interface - the main point being that audio playback on Amiga was higher quality than most competitors. 1 link to this video 2 link…