29 Nov
2005
29 Nov
'05
10:14 p.m.
Last trivia question for the day/night: I own Studio
Session (the reason I
keep a mac 512 around) and I swear I am hearing 6 digital voices from it
simultaneously. I was under the impression that the Mac sound hardware was
only 4 digital voices, and that the extra 2 voices were done via realtime
mixing on two of the channels -- however, literature from the time claim that
Jam Session/Studio Session use "hardware tricks" to get the extra 2 voices.
Who is right?
Neither really. The original Mac sound hardware had four *synthesis* voices,
which could be fed a waveform and act as a primitive wavetable synthesizer.
This produces four-note polyphony.
The other possibility is to drive the sound chip in "free form" mode, which
is basically conventional PCM audio output. I don't know Studio Session well,
but I suspect it just does the mixdown in software and plays the music out
in this mode instead of using the synthesizer.
Look at
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.09/09.03/Sound101/
"Ancient History" and then for some actual code examples,
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.02/02.02/SoundMadeSimple/
--
--------------------------------- personal: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ ---
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Don't let 'em drive you crazy when it's within walking distance.
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