OctaMED
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OctaMED is a popular music tracker for the Amiga, written by Teijo Kinnunen. The first version, 1.12, was released in 1989 under the name MED, which stands for Music EDitor. In April 1990, version 2.00 was released with MIDI support as the main improvement. In 1991 the first version with the name OctaMED was released, so-called as it could replay eight independent channels on the Amiga's four-channel sound chip.
The distinguishing feature of MED and OctaMED in comparison to other music trackers on the Amiga was that MED and OctaMED were chiefly used by musicians to create stand-alone works, rather than by game or demo musicians to make tunes that play in the context of a computer game or demo. Firstly, this is because the MED and OctaMED music replay routine is simply too slow to be used in a game or demo. Most trackers are optimised for speed of replay code, taking less than 3% of CPU time. MED took roughly 20% of CPU time. Secondly, and this also the reason why MED is so slow, the MED format allowed a lot of complexity in the music construction, with arbitrary length pattern sheets, sections and blocks rather than a simple pattern-list, and a greater number of effects for the sound. This additional complexity was welcomed by music composers, who preferred additional structure to their music and did not see it as a simple list of timed note-presses.
The technique of playing more channels of music than the Amiga hardware was capable of was first introduced with Jochen Hippel's "Hippel 7V" routine, which used one regular Amiga sound channel, and performed software mixing of two channels as the source of the remaining three Amiga hardware sound channels. The reason for using seven channels rather than eight was because the sound routine used all CPU capacity of the 68000-based Amiga. The seven-voices routine then appeared in TFMX. Finally, the routine was optimised so it had time to mix one more pair of channels, and therefore could produce eight channels of sound. This first appeared in another tracker called Oktalyzer and Face The Music. Finally, this appeared in OctaMED.
OctaMED was developed on the Amiga until 1996. The last version, called OctaMED Soundstudio, had features like MIDI file support, ARexx support, support for 16-bit and stereo samples, hard disk recording, support for up to 64 channels.
Teijo Kinnunen handed over the development of the Amiga OctaMED to other programmers soon after the last version was released. Teijo later released a Windows port, but the lack of features and presence of noticeable bugs meant this edition did not achieve the same level of fame as the Amiga release. Another version of the Windows port has been promised since 1998. As of 2004, this has still not been released.