[comp.sys.amiga.audio] What's the max sampling?

RAS <PYC118@uriacc.uri.edu> (04/02/91)

I'd like to know just how long an audio piece could be played back on a 1meg
Amiga if this piece was sampled at, say, 20khz and resided in RAM. Would it
make a difference if the sounds were more complicated? I mean, would i be able
to have longer samplings from a speech than Mozart's Symphony in G minor?
I'd like to digitize the intro of a song which is about a minute long.
Rasiel

es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) (04/02/91)

In article <49467@nigel.ee.udel.edu> PYC118@uriacc.uri.edu (RAS) writes:
>I'd like to know just how long an audio piece could be played back on a 1meg
>Amiga if this piece was sampled at, say, 20khz and resided in RAM. Would it
>make a difference if the sounds were more complicated? I mean, would i be able
>to have longer samplings from a speech than Mozart's Symphony in G minor?
>I'd like to digitize the intro of a song which is about a minute long.
>Rasiel


	If you record at 20K/sec, then you are recording at
20K/sec no matter how simple or complicated. As to recording (I
assume you have a HD if you are doing this kind of stuff) look
into AGMSPlaySound and AGMSRecordSound which allow digitizing to
disk and playing from disk so that RAM isn't a problem. Playing
back can go full-speed with a HD, but recording has its limits.
On a 68000 you may be limited to under 10K/sec.
	I have an A3000 and had a hard time recording at any
decent speed so I used AudioMaster to record the sound, and when
I ran out of memory I pressed pause on the CD player, saved it,
and started recording anew and then started the CD again.
	-- Ethan

Q: How many Comp Sci majors does it take to change a lightbulb
A: None. It's a hardware problem.

LASKEY@svax05.pcr.co.uk (04/02/91)

>>I'd like to know just how long an audio piece could be played back on a 1meg
>>Amiga if this piece was sampled at, say, 20khz and resided in RAM. Would it
>>make a difference if the sounds were more complicated? I mean, would i be able
>>to have longer samplings from a speech than Mozart's Symphony in G minor?
>>I'd like to digitize the intro of a song which is about a minute long.
>>Rasiel

>	If you record at 20K/sec, then you are recording at
>20K/sec no matter how simple or complicated. As to recording (I
>assume you have a HD if you are doing this kind of stuff) look
>into AGMSPlaySound and AGMSRecordSound which allow digitizing to
>disk and playing from disk so that RAM isn't a problem. Playing
>back can go full-speed with a HD, but recording has its limits.
>On a 68000 you may be limited to under 10K/sec.
>	I have an A3000 and had a hard time recording at any
>decent speed so I used AudioMaster to record the sound, and when
>I ran out of memory I pressed pause on the CD player, saved it,
>and started recording anew and then started the CD again.
>	-- Ethan

	I have a 68000 A500 machine with an A590 HD, and used Audiomaster to
sample sounds to memory, save them to disk in about 1meg blocks, and use the
AmigaDOS Join command to string them together to form a sample length of over
6 megabytes.  There is a PD program called PLAY590 which reads the samples back
from disk as it plays, using little memory and not much CPU time.  To do this
in stereo, you need two sample files- one for left and one for right.  This
obviously increases machine usage.

	I managed a 20K/sec sample playback, and the HD was still actually
going into wait states for every read.  No problems, and at 20 Khz it sounded
beautiful.  Very good.

================================================================================
Mike Laskey                      \||/              Mystic Mage
Contact address:                  ||              of Alteration
UUCP                              ||     "Down with your Necromancy, I'll
LASKEY@UK.CO.PCR.SVAX05		 /||\      see you in the Astral plane!"
================================================================================
        Anyone into Belinda Carlisle or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons?
================================================================================

es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) (04/03/91)

In article <49533@nigel.ee.udel.edu> LASKEY@svax05.pcr.co.uk writes:
>
>	I have a 68000 A500 machine with an A590 HD, and used Audiomaster to
>sample sounds to memory, save them to disk in about 1meg blocks, and use the
>AmigaDOS Join command to string them together to form a sample length of over
>6 megabytes.  There is a PD program called PLAY590 which reads the samples back

	Actually that isn't a great idea. Because when you save
an IFF file there is a header are which if played back, will
sound a bit wierd. When you join them together directly there are
several headers that are getting inserted into the file. I'm not
sure that player programs will be smart enough to deal with that.
	-- Ethan

Q: How many Comp Sci majors does it take to change a lightbulb
A: None. It's a hardware problem.