Hi everyone,

I've heard there is this sound card that can go in the amiga clock port. my attempts to find the product were unsuccessful in figuring out how to buy one. Are they for sale?

Also I'm not sure it's worth getting if all it does is decompress mp3 audio and such. I would be looking for something that allows music composition to be greater. For example, increase the 4 8-bit voices of the amiga to say.. 8? or maybe change the 8-bit sounds to 16 bit, although I already have 16 bit samplers so 8 bit is kinda preferable to keep that gritty sound.

Even if this isn't the case, I ordered a 1233 recently and will be moving my clock card over to it freeing this port. Is there anything else that port can be used for that would be worthwhile?

Thanks,
Claeb

@227

It remains a mythical product because it is much easier to develop an AHI driver for a soundcard that doesn't exist.

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@227

The Prisma is primarily for decoding compressed audio since most A1200 setups will struggle to be able to do this using their CPU alone, rather than for providing an alternative general audio output for the Amiga.

There are full-blown soundcards for the clock port, suck as the Delfina and the Prelude, but these are kinda rare these days, and of course they won't do anything to change or improve the native sound output so only software coded to use AHI can take advantage of such cards. Most older trackers don't support these so there's no way of increasing the number of voices available for software like that - the native hardware is your only option.

OctaMED supports more channels and will mix them. It does have support for some sound cards so you might be lucky with that.

Other uses for the clock port are USB cards, and (probably less relevant these days) high-speed serial and parallel interfaces and Catweasel cards for using PC floppy drives.

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@227

I found that when the Amiga got 16-bit sound cards it kinda lost it. Thay sacrificed channels for quality. Most only were one track stereo! So not good for a general sound card but made for music production with the right software.

I thought we should have got sound cards to duplicate the Atari sound chip. MIDI with 8x16-bit hardware channels at least. Then we could have done some real tracking.

@227

The Amiga can output 14 bit, 56 or 48 KHz and mix at least 12 voices/channels using only Paula and a reasonably good 68K cpu. It also requires the use of a 31kHz screen mode like Multiscan. Digi Booster 2 is a good program to such things and it also supports Fast Tracker and Pro Tracker module formats plus many more, and 16 bit samples.

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@227

The Prisma is just for streamed audio decoding, so playback of recorded music, that sort of thing. If you want to play modules and compose tracker tunes, it's not for you.
It's very good at doing that, but it is not and never will be a general purpose sound card as used by trackers, sorry (though the possibility of a limited AHI device is still being looked at, the MHI driver for AmigaAmp and similar is much more suited to it)

@227

Quote:

I've heard there is this sound card that can go in the amiga clock port. my attempts to find the product were unsuccessful in figuring out how to buy one. Are they for sale?

apparently not.

Quote:

Also I'm not sure it's worth getting if all it does is decompress mp3 audio and such.

apparently its all it does. it has been advertised as a sound card but in fact its simply streaming audio decoder. novocoder implemented support for background music playback in few of his ports. other than that i think its more worth to get a $5 mp3 usb thumb than dedicate your amiga for this task.

Quote:

I would be looking for something that allows music composition to be greater. For example, increase the 4 8-bit voices of the amiga to say.. 8? or maybe change the 8-bit sounds to 16 bit, although I already have 16 bit samplers so 8 bit is kinda preferable to keep that gritty sound.

you may get a proper sound card. i guess there was something for clockport called delfina flipper or whatever. or you may wait till apollo team implement their super paula in fpga along with 16 bit audio.

Quote:

Even if this isn't the case, I ordered a 1233 recently and will be moving my clock card over to it freeing this port. Is there anything else that port can be used for that would be worthwhile?

perhaps an usb controller?
http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/Main_Page

wow this thread filled up fast! Thanks so much for all the insight!

Yea i remember even with my blizzard 030 back in the day (RIP) I could only get mp3's to play back at very low quality.. my ACA 1233 is on it's way.. not even going to try that kind of stuff this time around..

Yea that audio stuff doesn't sound like anything I'd be looking for. I remember card lusting after this one tower card (I've never owned a tower amiga so it was a cart before the horse...) that gave 8 tracks of 16 bit audio.. I thought it was defina also, but this is like something from the 90's I think..

Man I'd love to be able to multitrack with the amiga like I can with my mac and pc. I mean even literally doing 8 bit multitracking not just tracker/sample stuff.. could be fun to see what music would sound like doing long tracks of 8 bit audio multitracking..

as it is i'm going to be exploring using two SMTPE devices I own (PPC-110 and a syncman) with Bars and Pipes and / or Music X

http://medias.audiofanzine.com/images/normal/jl-cooper-electronics-pps-100-165697.jpg

http://medias.audiofanzine.com/images/normal/m-audio-syncman-plus-267729.jpg

so I can do some multitracking.. possibly even do something crazy like trying to slave a PC/Mac to it treating the PC/Mac as a 8 track with my MOTU 828.. heh heh. good times..


Also today was a VERY good tech day for the Amiga.. I got in touch with the creator of Bars and Pipes (Alfred) and he sent me the HTML version of the manual and guides for the various tools (like Arpegi-8!) so I have a little "light reading" ahead of me.. but i'm looking forward to it.

Now to find a Music-X manual.. I have some other threads to update though about all this (and more i won't babble on this thread about) :)

The idea of a USB slot sounds neat, but also sounds like a lot of deeper stuff I'm realistically never going to have the stomach for. I wasn't much of a power user even when I was a dedicated amiga user years back..

Thanks!
Caleb

@Hillbillylitre

Just wondering how Paula, mixing at 14 bits, works under emulation...?

Has anyone tried pushing Digibooster Pro, 12ch at 14 bits under emulation?

Q!

"i am home"

@QuBe

Quote:

Just wondering how Paula, mixing at 14 bits, works under emulation...? Has anyone tried pushing Digibooster Pro, 12ch at 14 bits under emulation?

The "14 bits" trick works just fine under WinUAE, and since you can emulate a more powerful CPU it can mix way more channels than a 060 equipped Amiga ever could.

@QuBe

Just tested here and I get all 128 tracks filled with sample loops at the same time using 14 bit paula with max quality in winuae and DBP 2.21. I can not see any reason to use that many tracks, think I have never used more than 16 tracks ever on my twelve hundred and believes there is CPU for more. But 4 channels is enough in my opinion if mixing down several tracks to single samples, also called track bouncing. Can track bounce down to two channels stereo too by the way, so then 2 channels is actually enough in my opinion...

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Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@Hillbillylitre

Obiously the fake 14-bit is no true 16-bit. I read it sets the volume of one channel to 1 or something so don't really see how that ends up adding 6-bit more bits to the mix. Expect affecting the annalogue output. In which case the effect would be lost in emulation.

Sure you can do software mixing, not as efficient as hardware mixing. But you need a good mixing program to make it worthwhile. Don't know how the Digi Booster 2 mixng routines work. Nor exactly what AHI does with a good mode. But adding all the samples together then dividing by the total to get an average and avoid clipping, which I've seen done before, is not a proper mixing routine.

@Hypex

It sounds a lot better with 14 bits than standard 8 bit at least, of course one must also calibrate the audio signal on the 1200, dont think that is needed in winuae.

When it comes to mixing in Digibooster I think you can choose between 8 and 16 bit internal mixing so if you render to disk you get 16 and 8 bit AIFF files. One must also adjust sound boost in prefs to just avoiding clipping. Properly I don't know but it sounds good. If using a sound card or WinUAE one can of course use 16 bit instead of 14 output. Now its many years since I used DB to create something so my memory may be slightly incorrect.

Last edited by Hillbillylitre on 26-May-2015 at 03:05 PM.

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Using: One Commodore C64 - One Commodore Amiga 500 - One Commodore Amiga 1200 with BVision and Blizzard 68060 with PPC coprocessor running Amiga DOS - One Hellbillylitre Amigatwox86x64x6000x running Windows7

@227

Not sure why they didn't do a full blown sound card but hey.

The card mixes Paula output with it's own so you could add 8-bit or 14-bit audio from Paula to pre-encoded audio for recording on another device if that's in some way useful. Not an audio producer myself but I'm sure that could be a benefit for some if not yourself.

The chip on the board can encode audio as well as decode so in theory you should be able to encode Paula output in realtime but not sure if the software to encode will be present, information so far suggests that the driver development is focussed on playback only.

OctaMED allows eight channels or upto 64 if using Sound Studio. In case you missed it, A-EON also purchased the rights to further develop it for Amiga.

@Britelite

Thanks Britelite for your response.

Once I get a new computer and setup my emulation environment, I will definitely try it out.

Respect to you, for what you have done, and are doing, for the Amiga demo scene.

Keep inspiring us all :)

Q!

"i am home"

@Hillbillylitre

That is amazing Hillbillylitre.

I hope I can get some setup assistance from yourself when I am at the stage I can do similar.

I used to track modules and I would like to do it again.

For down sampling 4 protracker tracks to 1 sample I used to use "mod2sample" if I remember correctly; that was about 20 years ago or so...

Q!

"i am home"

@Rob

Quote:

Not sure why they didn't do a full blown sound card but hey.

Just a wild guess, but "full blown" sound card using uncompressed LPCM requires a pretty big chunk of bandwidth. The wider the samples, the higher the sample rate, the more bandwidth is needed.

I don't know off hand what a clockport can support as a sustained rate, but I suspect it might not be enough for what you are thinking.

Just 44.1 Khz 16 bit stereo, if being passed through an 8 bit port (is the clockport is 8 bits wide??)
would require 176.4k writes per second, continuously while playing.

To be honest I have no idea how much of a load that would place on a typical classic system. Then of course there must be buffers big enough to "cover" normal multitasking too.

It's not quite as simple as it may first appear to be.

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@lylehaze

no need to invent excuses. the card in question is for what i know not clockport exclusive but both zorro and clockport card. if it wasnt making sense technically none would develop a full blown zorro sound cards. but hey, they did. and guess what, you can even do multitrack 16bit hd recording on sensibly expanded amiga!

therefore the simplest explanation that comes to mind, why they did what they did, is that because it was rather easy and didnt take that much effort and money.

@wawa

If it doesn't make sense over clock port it doesn't make sense over clock port. Whether it makes sense over Zorro doesn't affect the sense it makes over clock port. Another card that has different requirements can make sense over both Zorro AND clock port (maybe by emulating the clock port over zorro first?), this doesn't mean ALL zorro cards can work on a clock port.

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Using "voltage" instead of "potential", which leads to inventing new words like "amperage" instead of "current" (I, measured in A) or possible "charge" (amperehours, Ah or Coulomb, C). Sometimes I don't even know what people mean.

@227

I still have a SilverSurfer serial port which plugs into the clockport. Not much use in the broadband era, but back in the day made my A1200 a dial-up demon. Easily out-performed a PC and even my A1.

A few years ago, I looked around for a USB card, but like most exotic A1200 hardware, they seem to be very rare.

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