Amiga Samplers : Budget dance music in 1990

Here's a good recap of what sampling looked like in the time of Amiga: ▶ 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.

There is a great video on youtube that explains how it all works. ▶ 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.

Here's also a demonstration of using a sampler and a tracker with an Amiga, all from around 1990: ▶ 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.)

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 ports[1] 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 interface[3], and a music tracker[4] as the software) due to the fact that Amiga had better onboard audio, courtesy of Paula[5]. (IIRC, it wasn't until the Falcon that Atari caught up with Amiga in terms of onboard audio). [1] link [2] link [3] ▶ this video [4] link [5] link

I used to make music on the Amiga. There is one aspect that the article doesn't explain too well - what allowed the Amiga to flourish as a music making platform, is that it had onboard audio which was much more capable than most other computers of the time, thanks to Paula, which allowed multi channel, high sample rate audio playback [1] These hardware capabilites in turn allowed the development of the Amiga music software scene, in particular music trackers [2] The Amiga was the first mass produced computer where you could make music without plugging in expensive synths or samplers (like was common on the Atari ST for example - I remember my uncle connecting his ST to an Akai sampler and a Roland synth, as a kid I could never have afforded a setup like that). But, if you wanted 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] ▶ this video [4] link

Some models were cheaper than that. As an example you can see here[1] this particular model was 30 pounds in 1992, which is equivalent to about 50 dollars[2]. Depending on the time or place they may have been a bit more expensive so it makes sense that in your case you had to spend $100... but let's not forget that a stand-alone sampler was at least 10 times more expensive, so the Amiga was still 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] ▶ this video [2] link

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