Zip Drives & Sample Conversion; Amisox & Soxgui

As we might expect, quite a few Amiga hardware and software companies are pulling out all the stops in order to get new products out, as Amiga Technologies bring their new Amigas into the shops. On the music front, New Dimensions, for example, have brought out an updated version of their popular TechnoSound Turbo sampler. One of the biggest improvements is a move to 12‑bit sample processing internally. This both reduces any quality loss when manipulating 8‑bit samples and allows the software to be used with the New Dimensions' own 12‑bit sampler. Although this looks much like the 8‑bit version, the difference is that it connects to both the parallel and serial ports (a built‑in Thru connector allows another serial device to remain attached when using the sampler).

Although the new TechnoSound Turbo Pro 2 can't sample directly to disk in 12‑bit mode, it does have advantages in other areas, namely in that you do not need a PCMCIA port. This, of course, makes the package accessible to a wider range of users, than say HiSoft's (admittedly excellent) 12‑bit Aura package. Software‑wise, there are not just internal improvements — you'll also find a clever software‑based filtering system, and a range of new sample manipulation functions.

The TechnoSound Turbo Pro 2 software alone makes for an excellent 8‑bit sampling package, with its new, higher‑resolution internal routines, and it is due to this that the new software is being bundled with 8‑bit hardware for £39.99. This is aimed at users who just want an up‑to‑date 8‑bit Amiga sampling package (existing TechnoSound Turbo users can upgrade their software for just £10), but if you want to go the whole hog, then a further £49.99 will buy the hardware that provides the full 12‑bit sampling capability. For enquires, credit card orders and so on, contact New Dimensions on 01291 690933.

Zip A Dee Do Dah

A brand new SCSI peripheral — a hard drive called the Zip featuring removable disks with 100Mb capacity — has just been released by HiSoft. The drive itself is manufactured by Iomega, and uses disk cartridges that look much like conventional floppies, except they are a little fatter. The disks are supposed to be able to withstand a 1000G shock without damage to data, and to have an estimated shelf life of at least 10 years.

At the moment the Zip drive is an external one (it comes in a quite stylish, blue box about the size of a portable CD player), but there is a rumour going around about an internally fitting version, appearing perhaps as early as this Christmas. The Zip currently costs £179, including software and a 100Mb disk cartridge. Additional disks cost £15.99, and since this means that you are paying less than 16p per Mb for removable high‑capacity storage, this system could prove to be very useful for backing up conventional hard drives. More details from HiSoft on 01525 718181.

An Unlikely Connection

Someone wrote to me the other day asking why the authors of some Public Domain/shareware Amiga programs and utilities occasionally seem to provide facilities that are seemingly of little use to the Amiga community in general. Often, the utility was not actually written with the Amiga in mind, but has been ported to the Amiga from some other platform. References in the documentation to strange file formats (as used on Sun workstations, DEC machines, and so on) are one such typical giveaway, as are other heavyweight system references. Once you've read the documentation, you'll often find that the program started life running under an operating system called Unix.

Unix is a popular O/S on many large, multi‑user computer systems, and it has a particularly strong following amongst academic and research institutions around the world. Most universities, for example, have sites which run under Unix, and nowadays there is an amazing amount of freely distributable software available on this platform. Whilst programs written to run on high‑powered mainframes might at first sight appear to have little relevance to the Amiga, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. A great many Unix‑oriented utilities are written in the C programming language, and because they deliberately use simple command line‑style arrangements for their program input and output (rather than fancy gadget/menu‑based ones), such programs are often relatively easy to port, not only to the Amiga, but to many other computer environments as well.

This, of course, is exactly what happens as Amiga coders come across Unix programs that look as though they might be useful. The source code gets downloaded to the Amiga, and then, perhaps after a few modifications, it is recompiled to run as an Amiga Shell utility. Once it has proved useful, someone will probably write a program, providing an 'Amigatised', easy‑to‑use front end for the utility, and bingo — yet another Amiga utility program is available.

Enter Amisox And Soxgui

The reason I've mentioned this Unix connection is that there's been some interest of late in an Amiga sound sample conversion program called AmiSox, and as you've probably realised, AmiSox didn't really start life on the Amiga at all. It is, in fact, the port of a Unix program called Sox (SOund eXchange), and, needless to say, it can work with a far more exotic range of sample formats than you normally find in the world of the Amiga. The following raw formats are currently supported: IRCAM Sound Files, SoundBlaster (VOC), SPARC .AU, Mac HCOM, PC/DOS .SOU, Sndtool, and Sounder, NeXT .SND, Windows 3.1 RIFF/WAV, Turtle Beach .SMP, CD‑R and Apple/SGI AIFF and Amiga 8SVX.

As well as copying and translating files, AmiSox can also apply various effects to a sample, including rate alteration, signal averaging and sample reversal, echo, a vibro effect (which adds the famous, but somewhat dated, Fender Vibro‑Champ sound effect), and low/high‑ and band‑pass filtering. You can byte swap 16‑ and 32‑bit sample data (which you need to do when using samples created on some other machines, like PCs), and even statistically examine it!

Of course, all this sounds great, but AmiSox, like the original Sox, employs a Unix‑like command line interface, which makes it a bit of a nightmare to use. This is where SoxGui enters the scene. SoxGui, written by Stephan Klein, is a graphical user interface, allowing the less experienced (or simply lazy) Amiga user to access the most useful features and functions of AmiSox just by clicking with the mouse. SoxGui is not brilliant — it was churned out quickly in order to make the underlying AmiSox facilities accessible to a wider audience. In this respect, though, it does its job well enough, and if you like the idea of being able to perform some rather more esoteric sound sample format conversions than most common Amiga utilities can handle, then the AmiSox/SoxGui combination might provide the answer. Incidentally, I believe that the programs first appeared on the AmiNet, but by now they should be available from at least some of the larger Amiga PD/shareware suppliers.