3 ms·

The other trick was to use the tape loading routines to read audio from a cassette tape and digitize it as 1-bit audio at some low bit-rate (1.2kHz?). It sounde

by dhosek 4y ago

The other trick was to use the tape loading routines to read audio from a cassette tape and digitize it as 1-bit audio at some low bit-rate (1.2kHz?). It sounded pretty awful and you couldn't hold much audio in RAM, but it was possible. I had a floppy with an excerpt from Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog digitized with this technique.

CamperBob2 4y ago
I remember being astonished at how realistic Vincent Price's laugh from the end of Thriller sounded when replayed using this hack. Either it didn't have enough high-frequency content to alias, or the aliases just added to the effect.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
I have a program on disk called Apple Rock ‘83 that has 4 of those songs, including Black Dog. The author built a quiz around the songs. The others were, I think, Eruption by Can Halen and … now I forget then others.
- pvg 4y ago
  Did you ever get around to posting it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28757274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28757274 I wonder how it will compare to other bits and pieces of Apple ][ sampled sound that are floating about.
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    I posted it after reading your comment. Thanks for the reminder: https://youtu.be/RKPaacw8UHk https://youtu.be/RKPaacw8UHk
Someone 4y ago
I remember you could get a fairly high frequency (¿12kHz, maybe even 20kHz?) if you were willing to not sample uniformly. On a 6502, you would shift 8 1-bit samples into a single byte at high frequency, spend some time writing the byte, rapidly sampled 8 more bits, etc. The “write a byte” step also wasn’t constant time, as increasing the address to write to took longer when you crossed 256-byte boundaries. So, recording missed samples at predictable times. The trick was to make the playback code use the exact same timings. I think there was an article in Compute! for doing that on Commodore machines, but cannot find it.

by dhosek 4y ago

CamperBob2 4y ago

I remember being astonished at how realistic Vincent Price's laugh from the end of Thriller sounded when replayed using this hack. Either it didn't have enough high-frequency content to alias, or the aliases just added to the effect.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

I have a program on disk called Apple Rock ‘83 that has 4 of those songs, including Black Dog. The author built a quiz around the songs. The others were, I think, Eruption by Can Halen and … now I forget then others.

pvg 4y ago
Did you ever get around to posting it? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28757274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28757274 I wonder how it will compare to other bits and pieces of Apple ][ sampled sound that are floating about.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  I posted it after reading your comment. Thanks for the reminder: https://youtu.be/RKPaacw8UHk https://youtu.be/RKPaacw8UHk

Someone 4y ago

I remember you could get a fairly high frequency (¿12kHz, maybe even 20kHz?) if you were willing to not sample uniformly. On a 6502, you would shift 8 1-bit samples into a single byte at high frequency, spend some time writing the byte, rapidly sampled 8 more bits, etc. The “write a byte” step also wasn’t constant time, as increasing the address to write to took longer when you crossed 256-byte boundaries. So, recording missed samples at predictable times. The trick was to make the playback code use the exact same timings. I think there was an article in Compute! for doing that on Commodore machines, but cannot find it.