Octamed

OctaMED is a popular sound tracker for the Commodore Amiga, written by Teijo Kinnunen. The first version, 1.12, was released in 1989 under the name MED, which stands for Music EDitor. In April 1990, version 2.00 was released with MIDI support as the main improvement. In 1991 the first version with the name OctaMED was released, so-called as it could replay eight independent channels on the Amiga's four-channel sound chip. This was also the first commercial version of the software. The publisher throughout has been RBF Software of Southampton, UK which is run by Ray Burt-Frost.

The distinguishing feature of MED and OctaMED in comparison to other music trackers on the Amiga was that MED and OctaMED were chiefly used by musicians to create stand-alone works, rather than by game or demo musicians to make tunes that play in the context of a computer game or demo. Firstly, this is because the MED and OctaMED music replay routine is simply too slow to be used in a game or demo. Most trackers are optimised for speed of replay code, taking less than 3% of CPU time. MED took roughly 20% of CPU time. Secondly, and this is also one of the reasons why MED draws more CPU power, the MED format allowed a greater degree of complexity in music construction, with arbitrary length of pattern sheets, sections and blocks rather than a simple pattern-list, and a greater number of effects for the sound. This additional complexity was welcomed by music composers, who preferred more sophisticated structure to their compositions and did not see it as a simple list of timed note-presses.

The technique of playing more channels of music than the Amiga hardware was capable of was first introduced with Jochen Hippel's "Hippel 7V" routine, which used one hardware sound channel, and performed software mixing of two channels as the source of the remaining three Amiga hardware sound channels. The reason for using seven channels rather than eight was because the sound routine required more processing power than the 7.14 MHz 68000 CPU in the older (and later low-end) Amiga models could provide. The seven-channel routine then appeared in TFMX. Finally, the routine was optimised so it could mix an additional channel, resulting in eight channels of sound. The 8-channel routine first appeared in another tracker called Oktalyzer and Face The Music. Finally, this appeared in OctaMED.

OctaMED was developed on the Amiga until 1996. The last version, called OctaMED Soundstudio, had features like MIDI file support, ARexx support, support for 16-bit and stereo samples, hard disk recording, and support for up to 64 channels.