Digital Symphony

About

Digital Symphony is a soundtracker player/editor for the Acorn Archimedes/RiscPC that appeared around 1993, often claimed as the best in its category.

Although I agree for the player, which is superb, I can't agree for the editor.

Basically, the editor has the following bad points:

You have to select the effect and its parameters with the mouse in a menu ! What would think an ARM programmer about an editor in which opcodes could only get entered that way ! A total waste of time...

You can't edit with all the channels before your eyes.

You must edit the channels one at a time. This system allows for further compression for a final file, but is a pain in the neck for day-to-day use. There was a slight bug in the playback routine that made the playing speed go back and forth. I was said it was fixed in later versions.

However, the main good points are:

An excellent player ! It accepted 100% of amiga soundtrack files I threw at it (I have around 256 Megs of tunes in this format). It even allows loading and playback of so-called octaMED files (Though it chokes on some of them).

An excellent instrument editor. This part simply oozes with power! The redraws are lightning-fast. Cut and paste operations are stretched to points never seen before (on such programs). Some simple, really useful, effects are included such as fade-in and fade-out, but a separate program would have been needed to introduce much more interesting effects (Audible frequency of sample, resampling at any frequency, resampling a 8-bit sample to 16-bit, high-pass and low pass filters, and effects only achievable through Fourier transforms in general). In fact, this program could have been AudioWorks, but the latter blatantly lacks these features ...

A module is provided to allow playback of tunes in your own programs (games or demos)

Screenshot(s)

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