Together with the well known Dr. T's Midi Recording Studio, Pro Sound Designer, Sonix, SoundFX, Audition 4, HD-Rec, and Audio Evolution, there were also lots of Amiga software to pilot digitzers such as GVP DSS8 Plus 8bit audio sampler/digitizer for Amiga, SunrizeAD512 and AD516 professional 12 and 16-bit DSP sound cards for the Amiga that included Studio-16 as standard software, Soundstage professional 20-bit DSP expansion sound card for the Amiga, Aura 12-bit sound sampler which is connected to the PCMCIA port of Amiga 600 and Amiga 1200 models, and the Concierto 16-bit sound card optional module to be added to the Picasso IV graphic card, etcetera.
Sound design / SoftSynth
, FMSynth by Christian Stiens, Assampler, SoundFX, WaveTracer and Gajits' CM-Panion and 4D Companion patch editors.
Starting from 1987 with the release of Soundtracker, trackers became a new type of music programs which spawned the mod audio file standard. The Mod audio standard is considered the audio format that started it all in the world of computer music. After Soundtracker many clones appeared, including Noisetracker, Startrekker, Protracker. Also many deratives appeared, amongst which OctaMED and Oktalyzer. In the period from 1985 to 1995 when Amiga audio was of greater quality than other standard home computers, PC compatible systems began to be equipped with 8-bit audio cards inserted into 16 bit ISA bus slots. Soundtracker Module files were used on PC computers and were considered the only serious 8bit audio standard for creating music. The worldwide usage of these programs led to the creation of the so-called MOD-scene which was considered part of the demoscene. Eventually the PC world evolved to 16-bit audio cards, and Mod files were slowly abandoned. Various Amiga and PC games supported Mod as their internal standard for generating music and audio effects. Some trackers can use both sampled sounds and can synthesize sounds. AHX and Hively Tracker are special trackers in that they can't use samples, but can synthesize the sound created by Commodore 64 computers. Some modern Amiga trackers are DigiBooster Pro and Hively Tracker. Development of popular Amiga tracker OctaMED SoundStudio was handed over to a third party several times but the first two parties failed to produce useful results. A third attempt at creating an update will be undertaken by the current developer of Bars 'n Pipes.
MOD filetype evolution
Initially trackers were limited to 4 channel, 8-bit audio and 15 sampled instruments. By using software mixing some trackers achieved 6, 7 or 8 channel sound at the cost of CPU time and audio quality. Modern trackers can handle 128+ channel, 16-bit audio quality and can often handle up to 256 instruments. Some even support software synthesizer plugins as instruments.
Speech synthesis
The original Amiga was launched with speech synthesis software, developed by Softvoice, Inc.. This could be broken into three main components: narrator.device, which could enunciate phonemes expressed as ARPABET, translator.library which could translate English text to American English phonemes, and the SPEAK: handler, which any application including the command-line could redirect output to, to have it spoken. Reading SPEAK: as it is producing speech will return two numbers which are the size ratio of the width and height of a mouth producing the phoneme being spoken. In the original 1.x releases, a Say program demo was included with AmigaBASIC programming examples. From the 2.05 release on, narrator.device and translator.library were no longer present in the operating system but could still be used if copied over from older disks. The speak handler was not just a curiosity, or a gorgeous demonstration of capabilities of Amiga. In fact, the word processor ProWrite since its version 3.2 was able to read an entire document using the speech synthesizer for the benefit of blind users.
