Hi everyone,

I'm working on getting my Amiga 1200 using Bars and Pipes or Music-X to slave off of an Fostex 4 track (X-55) using a syncman. I believe everything is working.

I'm have some shots from my music-x testing:






i just need to figure out how to insure that the amiga is setup properly to slave to SMPTE... one of the things i noticed is that i set it to slave to SMPTE.. and yet when i hit play.. the sequencer will start playing without any signal from the syncman..

Any advice / tips would be much appreciated.

what i know so far is that the syncman is successfully stripping the 4th audio track of the 4 track.. and when i play the tape back the sign is strong enough / good i believe to light up both the "tape" and "midi" LED light.. it's just a matter of getting the software to be listening/acting on that incoming data.

Thanks!
Caleb

Last edited by 227 on 28-May-2016 at 07:53 PM.
Last edited by 227 on 28-Apr-2016 at 05:51 AM.

@227

The first photo clearly shows a MIDI Start Stop menu item just below the one you have highlghted, does that have any pertinent settings?

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@broadblues

i will check it when i get home today. i looked at them but nothing about it jumped out at me as needed for this.. but yea maybe that's the key. i'm totally new to music-x itself so i'm learning basically everything about it..

I tried BnP which i know a "little" better.. but it didn't seem to do any better.. and music-x seems to have more options and a little more straight forward .

There is another Dr T product I got recently that I think might support MTC/SMPTE as well that I need to check out..

I jus wish Tiger Cub supported it. It's still the one I know best.

Ok I got it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdecP2zCAYs

thanks for the tip about the midi start / stop.. it was not set to receive..

next will be to see if the MTC from a Korg D1600 will work the same way.. exciting times!

@227

Is there a Dr. T's KCS?

@Hypex

i actually have it but haven't installed it yet. i have an ADF somewhere. I've heard good things about it. Also it's kinda cool that I just realized that Emily Tobenfeld who I knew worked on Tiger Cub also worked on KCS. She's also here in the Boston area where I live which was kinda cool. So I'm writing her to see what she might know about the product / manual still. Small world.

I'm hoping to find the manual somewhere now for KCS. I LOVE tigercub for its straight forward design and access to the Amiga's internal voices as a sampler of sorts (though not without some gripes but i'll manage). Knowing that it's something Emily was part of does make me wonder how similar it will be to Tiger Cub..

I'm having trouble understanding how to get Bars and Pipes to slave to the MTC that's incoming.. i guess that will be another thread.. because at least now i know for sure the hardware all works.. just a matter of figuring out how to

I have one of the creators of BnP also in my email. I may hit him up next to see what he might know. He was kind enough to get me the manuals for bnp which I need to review as well. BnP still boggles me a little.. a neat program but just lots of options to the initiate.

@227

My memory does work after all. For some reason I'm thinking that Emily might be kinda hot. Must be the Amiga connection.

I always wanted to setup an Amiga MIDI mini studio to do my house music with but never had the room. Well had the room but not the space. Otherwise I would be more helpful in this area.

BTW just noticed in your picture you have nothing connnected to the MIDI in on your Syncman. Is this normal?

Last edited by Hypex on 30-Apr-2016 at 05:13 PM.

@Hypex

she was kind enough to invite my wife and I to some event she was doing in Boston, but being parents and at the time we were unable to get a sitter to attend.. this was awhile back. I was asking her some questions about Tiger Cub.. she worked on the Atari ST version another guy (who's email didn't work) David Silver or something like that did the Amiga port. I was wondering if I had the official latest version.. but I suppose I could find whatever is online and check that.. I've never had a problem with Tiger Cub but you know.. maybe they snuck in MTC support :) It was really cool though to connect with someone who made such a significant piece of software I used for so many years ago.

Yea it's been fun to see things work. I've also been excited to learn / experiment with all these program.. i had no idea there were soft synths for the amiga back in the day.. back when internet wasn't a given and I was still in many ways a musical noob back then..

Yea honest I don't see why midi in is needed on the syncman.. I'm sure there is a good reason for it, but the bottom line is that the amiga only needs the out from the syncman to go IN to the amiga to keep it synced up. I didn't know for sure though if MTC / SMPTE needed some kind of return signal, but i'm happy to report it doesn't.

@227

Shame to couldn't make it. But hopefully you get this sorted out. So have you been through the other menu options? I notice a few time related menus. There should be one there for input time apart from what you have. Monitor looks clear.

@Hypex

yea it's working now. that video link above shows it. I have KCS now as well. I don't have a manual for it.. i'll kick the tires though and see if it's intuitive enough.

i watched the video on music-x and I'm seeing why people like it..

bars and pipes though is appealing because of some of the nice plugins like software arpeggiators and the sampler (pitch bend via midi!) but not if i can't get MTC/SMPTE to work with it. I have the manuals though so I need to read up on how bnp listens to MTC

@227

Ah that's good news. Don't know if it's true but heard some Madonna songs were done in BnP. I also experimented with SuperJAM! Bit funny how it worked, and had the same interface, but I enjoyed seeing how it mixed multi tracks together.

@Hypex

I just grabbed some adf's including superjam and some others that sounded interesting to test out.. the main amiga is meant mainly to be the sequencer but i have my 2nd A1200 that is fair game to be any number of things.. sampler.. soft synth.. effects processor..

especially love the programs that do realtime dsp.. nice gritty 8 bit effects..

@227

That's cool and A1200 can do that. Just out of interest, did you ever try Symphonie? This was a modern tracker that had multi channels and DSP. My A1200/030@40 was just poweful enough to mix about 8 stereo tracks plus DSP and play in 8-bit at realtime.

It was also the first tracker I tested where the modules sounded like real music. Well real techno I mean.

@Hypex

no that sounds incredible. i'll check it out. i was never much of a tracker guy (too much into realtime playing to compose quality tracker stuff, but yea that's what i have.. 030/40 (no fpu) so that might hurt it. but yea if it has realtime effects that could be really nice.

I wish I had an old A2000 with that 8 track 16bit sound card from back in the say.. that was my dream machine back then when it was WAAAAY out of my price range.. but now they are so rare / extinct.. it's not really more likely i'd ever have one.

I'm making due with the Korg D1600 via MTC.. obviously a more powerful unit but slaving to MTC / external stuff just would be fun if it were all internal.. and good ol' nostalgia.. :)

the main goal now is to explore Music-X fully (i'm very interested in the patch library feature) and other stuff. The fact that it does play samples from the amiga is a huge plus.. since i know it works nicely with MTC.

BnP shows support for SMPTE.. but it doesn't seem to work with MTC.. so for the sake of progress I'm going to pursue Music-X. The thing about BnP that i really liked was 1. it's sampler feature had things like pitch bend / vibrato.. 2. transposing phrase sequencer 3. SMPTE/MTC (if it worked)

I probably need to start a specific thread about BnP / MTC..

@227

Quote:

but yea if it has realtime effects that could be really nice.

It had a kind of master bus it would add effects too so for the most part it would add an echo (oh sorry I mean delay ) to the output. Which I thought was kind of funny at the time and wondered why it did that.

Endless dream is the mod to watch for. Well I liked it. IIRC I even taped it so I could listen to it in the shower and only the best Amiga mods got that treatment. Which was usually relegated to real music.

Quote:

I wish I had an old A2000 with that 8 track 16bit sound card from back in the say..

Whaaaaat!? I've never heard of that! That would crap all over the 16-bit sound cards that came later. Which usually only had one channel. Good for musicians, crap for realtime super mods.

Perhaps you could "emulate" this 8 track 16 bit sound card by hooking up an Atari Falcon up to the Amiga with MIDI. The Falcon put us to shame. And this was before Commodore kicked the Amiga nuts in by still not putting MIDI on board the A1200.

Quote:

I'm making due with the Korg D1600 via MTC.

Looks cool.

Quote:

I probably need to start a specific thread about BnP / MTC..

And there it is. I'll refrain from posting until I really have something to say. I'm currently invading all your latest threads.

@Hypex

yea it sounds like that program's delay is more internal.. the way the realtime effects i have work is that they are made for realtime input / recording.. which allows you to hear the output.. I wish I had a faster CPU though because some of the programs to do realtime DSP requires very low sample rates.. but then again I'm not running things through the amiga to make them sound crystal clear.. the gritty 8-bit sound is desired. Some of the effects are outputting as low as 4khz in order to be realtime on my 030/40mhz..

Yea this is the card. The Sunrize AD516.. I remember drooling over that card in the early 90's in high school.. when I was a broke teenager. As fun as it sounds, I'm happy with the D1600. I'm not even sure how the Sunrize would internally sync with a midi program.


































Hey it's a quiet forum. Anyone who has anything to share is welcome! :) Not a whole lot of Classic Amiga people around with time to check in here. I'm grateful.

Thanks!
Caleb

@227

With Mediator expander slot card, you can add cheap PCI PC audio cards to your Amiga 1200 or Amiga 4000...

Here is the list:

http://www.elbox.com/mediator_driver_guide.html

Mediator is difficult to purchase, but once you got it, you can find many of these audiocards on Ebay for a very cheap price, and they are more performant than any Sunrize Studio8 or Studio16 audiocards for Amiga.

_________________
"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).

@Raffaele

cool that's an option but yea i'm not making an A1200 tower :) The other thing is what software would work with those sound cards..

I'm more interested in the "vintage" aspect of it. using the original gear, not hacking stuff so much.

One of the things that drove my studio to be made was for music ideas I wanted to do for a game set in a post apocalyptic 1996.. I thought it would be fun to only use gear that existed before 1996 for the soundtrack.. That game is on hold right now.. but the studio continues on be almost entirely gear from 1999 or older..

The korg D1600 is from 2001.. but i don't really count that because its just a multitrack recorder.. instruments / effects / software is more important because that's how the songs are composed / altered primarily.

@227

Yes 4Khz in 8-bit will sound a bit gritty.

I do recall the Sunrise card but I didn't know the specs. Or had forgotten. Yes 8 track stereo would have been quite good back then. I read it can do 5 tracks on a 68000, at least an 68030 for 8. Mostly due to streaming off HD by the looks off it.

Would have made a fun 16-bit module player.

I even found this article from this SOS site I keep coming across for different things. Well searching related to music. But it was interesting to find it existed back then and spoke of the Amiga!

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/1994_articles/jun94/amiganotes.html

@Raffaele

Yes but for multitrack audio it would need a powerful CPU. Even if there is some type of hardware mixer on board, the AHI drivers wouldn't use it, and AHI uses it's own soft mixing routines.

That is if you use AHI based software. Since it's pretty much useless without any kind of driver. Except the Maestrix to fool MaestroPro supporting software to use an AHI supported card.

So in an Amiga a cheap PC audio card is nothing more than a simple one track 16-bit output device. And 16-bit sampler if supported. By comparison it's performance would be crapped on by the Sunrize.