In the following article I describe a process for refurbishing old Amiga tunes. This is a follow-up to http://blog.airmann.de/uade-multichannel-audio-support.
First, what’s the motivation behind ? Why refurbish Amiga tunes at all ?
Answer: original tunes often are poorly mixed and are not optimized for playback on modern audio equipment. So the goal is to polish those gems soundwise without altering the tunes itself, and finally transfer them into proper formats for playback on nowadays audio equipment.
So why should the original mixes be not optimal ? What’s the matter ?
- technical limitations: most ancient trackers didn‘t provide EQ‘s, filters, stereo balancing, compressors, delay, reverb, etc.. Thus, the mixing results were pretty limited
- missing original author‘s audio mixing skills / awareness: E.g. no proper stereo balancing, frequency balancing and volume leveling. E.g. bass and drums tracks were panned hard to left/right, frequency ranges of instruments overlap, etc..
- A lot of ancient samples and waveforms contained DC offset which negatively affects bass frequency range
Ok, so how does the refurbishing process look in detail ? Answer: for more information read the following script in PDF format:
How_To_Refurbish_Amiga_Tracker_Chiptunes
For the lazy visual guys:
Hello Matthias
Thank you for making your quad version of uade available and for your guide on refurbishing Amiga chip music. It has been very useful indeed.
I am using the quad version of uade and Audacity to mix and refurbish my favourite Amiga game music. I have found a problem with the quad channel output and the Alien Breed music (http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/Alien_Breed). When I convert the module to a four channel wave the music is cut off at 4:16, when it is converted to a two channel wave it is not cut and the music is output in its entirity, this effects all the modules over 4:16 in length. Example commands I used:
uade123 –quadmode –filter=NONE –force-led=0 –frequency=48000 –resampler=SINC -f ALIENMENU.wav bp.ALIENMENU
uade123 –filter=NONE –force-led=0 –frequency=48000 –resampler=SINC –panning=0.0 -f ALIENMENU.wav bp.ALIENMENU
I’m not sure if the problem is with uade or with the modules. I know a bit of programming so I could look at the source code, but I imagine the problem will be quite obscure.
Best wishes
John
Hey John,
thanks for feedback. Glad to hear it’s usefull. Indeed a strange behaviour. Have you tried to disable resampler and panning switches ? Resampling could theoretically be done later on using e.g. SoX which has a world class resampling algorithm. Anyway, I’ll have a look at it ASAP.
Regards
Matthias
Hi Matthias
Just tried it without the resampler:
uade123 –quadmode -f ALIENMENU.wav bp.ALIENMENU
Still chops off the end.
John
Hi John,
I’ll have a look at it tomorrow. Nonetheless, another idea: how big are the resulting files in bytes and is there enough disk space ?
Hi Matthias
There’s no hurry :-)
File sizes:
uade123 –quadmode -f ALIENMENU.wav bp.ALIENMENU : 86.1 MiB
uade123 -f ALIENMENU.wav bp.ALIENMENU : 47.5 MiB
I have 87.0 GiB free space and am running Linux Mint 17.3 KDE 64bit. Uade is compiled from source.
John
The med.intro track from the TFX theme also cuts out at 4:16 in quad channel mode.
It then ocurred to me that 4:16 mins is 256 seconds. I think this could be a clue, since 2^8 is 256.
Had the idea whilst I was trying to sleep, hence my bad spelling!
ok, I’ve analysed the problem. It’s a bug that should be fixed, now.
I’ll release an updated tar.gz file as soon as possible.
Meanwhile you can use this additional command line switch as a workaround: –subsong-timeout=-1
Brilliant! Thanks for fixing the problem :-)
I spent some time yesterday looking at the code, but I couldn’t see much difference between the two channel and four channel code paths.
That’s a worthwhile hint. I’ll check it out. Unfortunately I didn’t find the time today. I’ll do it ASAP.