Streamsound
IIgs Music
Streamsound Demo:
The purpose of this demonstration is to show that the Apple IIgs can
play the
long sounds commonly found on the web if people are willing to write
players to
crack the format. Here is a 5.7MB song ("Superstar" from Carpenters,
a classic
favorite) bundled with the Oversampler freeware player. The sound has
been
converted to the binary format standard for IIgs raw sounds and will
open using
Oversampler with the correct playback rate. Set oversampling to 2X
for the best
effect. The quality of the sound is surprisingly good when routed through
external speakers. It sounds more like FM radio than an Apple II computer.
Oversampler is a streaming player, which means that it plays as it reads
the
sample from disk. This is how the Macintosh, PC, and other computers
are able
to play long sounds without running out of memory. As long as you have
enough
memory to boot GS/OS (~1.25MB, maybe 1.5MB) and you have a reasonably
fast hard
disk drive, you can play sounds megabytes in size.
The streaming playback technique also demonstrates a possible method
for
digitizing large sounds without also having large amounts of RAM. All
current
IIgs software digitizes sounds to RAM. The length of the sound that
can be
recorded is limited by the amount of memory that you have installed.
If someone
implements a streaming digitizing program, then the IIgs can digitize
samples
directly to disk (and the length would be limited only by the largest
file that
can be created on that disk). With a removable cartridge drive, you
will be
able to create your own alblums.