As I'm doing a manual scan of the wealth of AmigaFiles in my archive to seek out new life and new civilizations and, ehmm, that was Star Trek (not StarTrekker), I mean to seek out new music formats not playable in EaglePlayer, DeliTracker or OctaMedPlayer and such on a real Amiga 1200.

This idea isn't new for the SOAMC= as on the REDUX project (2010) I manually added music and recorded manually many obscure formats that could only be played by the original software themselves.

Now, the past week or so I dug into the 8 Voices Soundtracker which had 1 song called "Demo-SongI" on the same disk it was released on. Surely there must be more tunes created in the past, right?

So, I started looking into the "Demo-SongI" file in hex viewer and figured out the following facts below.



After some more digging, focusing on the source code, I found a interresting source file called "OktalyzerPR.s" on these disks:



The source code simply says:

***************************************

* 8 Channels Tracker  *****************

***************************************

I managed to compile it and run in Seka v3.2, but no fonts was shown, but the layout is extremly "8 Voices Soundtracker" and "Oktalyzer", but the source does not mention any of the Oktalyzer v1.1 tags, or even the name "Oktalyzer", so chances are if this could get compiled and we could save a song, I'm pretty sure the format on that song would match the "8 Voices Soundtracker" 100% :-)

Download the source below. And do focus on the filename, especially the "PR" letters, could that stand for Oktalyzer Preview, which would indicate 8 Voices Soundtracker is really Oktalyzer pre v1.1 early preview?





When I first googled around for Demo-SongI and 8 Voices Soundtracker last week I came over a discussion on EAB. http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=83608&page=1 and also posted my findings there in which a user "niobyte" mentions that it does really look like Oktalyzer. So, I went ahead and googled some more, and also searched after Oktalyzer v1.0 (found v1.1 pretty quickly) and basically just looked at the end of both Oktalyzer v1.1 executable and the 8 Voices Soundtracker executable and found just too many 100% same byte streams, so I'm pretty sure that "The 8 Voices Soundtracker" isn't nothing else than an leaked/early/hacked version of Oktalyzer version lower than the known v1.1. See my screenshot of quick comparision of the two executables, and you'll see :-)

Heck, it could even be that Oktalyzer didn't start off by that name, but it really started out as "The 8 Voices Soundtracker" ?

Here's an interview with Armin Sander, the programmer of Oktalyzer:
http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwsander_en.php, which kind of gives clues to the history of Oktalyzer and the fact the "8 Voices Soundtracker" (by just calling it Soundtracker too) along with his most interresting comment at the end "I also reduced the screen resolution, because the text was hard to read." which makes sense since the font in "8 Voices Soundtracker" is more high-res than the Oktalyzer v1.1/v1.57 eventually became. Not to mention the GUI is pretty much layed out the same too.





1: Tune has no clear indentifer nowhere.
2: There is no space for songname internally, starts at once with first sample name at pos $0
3: Each Samplename can be 20 chars long, then 1 $0 byte followed by 5 bytes of sample length and possible other sample related bytes.
4: Max 36 samples, 0-9, A-Z
5: Can load over 500kb samples. Max alloted sample size is $xxxxx = $FFFFF = 1048575 bytes (based on whats visible in editor anyway)
6: Each sample name block is 32 bytes long

STATIC Key positions:
1152 = SPEED (can be $1-$F)
1153 = Length of Song, unknown, but no need no investigate
21 = $0 byte ALWAYS after samplename, so a pattern can be calculated since max samples are 36. Add +32 bytes to find next "end of samplename" until the end.

If you find $0 at pos 21 and so fourth 36 times, including a byte from $1 to $F at pos 1152, we have "some kind" of detection established.

Knowing 32bytes of allocated space for sample name and its details multiplied with max samples of 36, we KNOW that this block is always 1152 bytes long.

Possible, but not a precise "scanner" for this can be made, but would never be 100% due to the lack of headers in this format.

The reason for this special research, is that the SOAMC= ENDGAME is an automated music ripping project that uses "Pro-Wizard", "ExoticGUI Ripper", "Eagleplayer w/Eagleripper" and "ProWizard4PC" to automatically hunt down music to record. Since the 8 Voices Soundtracker format isn't detected by anything, I have to proceed with my own ripping :-)

It should be noted that my scans could only verify and check for potentional 8 Voices Soundtracker format by reading from file offset 0 and 1152. It means that if there was a song embedded inside an executable at a different fileoffset, even compressed with a standard compressor etc., my tools would never find them, even if they are there. The problem is as I started with "They should have left an unique signature for their format somewhere" to let us find more :-(


So, scanning my 3.7million ENDGAME datafiles with this approach, I managed to filter out only 150 files, where only 5 files where potentional 8-voices soundtracker format. But, it reveals that 1 of them was the "Demo-Songi" naturally, 3 of them was standard SoundTracker (of old type, without M.K. typical markings), but 1 file came out matching and becoming a authentic 8Voices-Soundtracker music.

First sample name was called "bd.pit". So, I took this file into my SOTDS Checksum Generator and search in my AmigaFiles SOTDS database for 100% match of this particular file and the following hits came out:

It turns out that in 1991 a group called SWANS and a MUSICIAN called Cyborg (a.k.a. Monty) composed that music 99% with certain with the 8Voices-Soundtracker released 2 years before in 1989.

Name of the song is "exodus". I don't know the intention of that demo, but seems to focus on the highlights of beeing able to play 8 voices soundtracker without referring back to the original program. Let me remind you that the original software disk had also a replay source in it. Would we to believe that SWANS created the 8voices demo to show off this as "first ever", or was it just a forgotten info to mention it was composed in an original software where they ripped the play routine and wrapped a short demo around it?

Who knows :-)

I do not claim we were supposed to "think" they were first with an 8-voice demo, as of course, many people and intro/demos never referred back to what software was used to create the music, including potentional music routines of course - but if that was the intention, consider yourselves proven otherwise - oh about 28 years later, hahaha!







Further study shows this entry on the janeway website
http://janeway.exotica.org.uk/release.php?id=56077

Where the music file was modified by "asle" to become an DeliTracker compatible Custom file that can be played in probably all players.

Naturally, there is also the "Demo-songI" from the original .ADF that nobody have ever made a player engine for, and are not made into custom DeliTracker either.
I didn't search too hard on Internet, but it might not be out there at all!


I think it should deserve a place in history, the design and operation of the software seems very delicate and nicely done, the editing is perfect too. It kind of looks like Octalyzer. Its a shame it never was promoted properly and come to think of its made in 1989 its a pretty nice music tracker that went beyond 4-channel so early on. Every option seems to work also, so the promoted "99%" is really true. But, it seems to have a cost by doing 8-channels at the same time and if we are to believe the stories around it, about 80% of CPU was used up while playing, leaving only 20% for everything else.



In our project the only two songs known in existence for this rare and very old type of SoundTracker clone will be recorded manually within the software running on A1200 (with patches or kick roms) to record it from the same machine.

If you have anymore, bring them on - but remember: I have scanned through 31million files, where 3.7million of these was part of my decrunched ENDGAME archive, so chances are that THIS IS THE ONLY TWO songs ever made and used or released in some form into the Amiga community which eventually ended up on internet hopefully.




By the way, it is often falsely reported as FAST/TakeTracker by players and websites, but thats not correct, example
http://amp.dascene.net/analyzer2.php?idx=113802

The correct format is "The 8 Voices Soundtracker" by Shining 8. Nobody knows what kind of extension the files should have either, as the music software itself does not allow for SongName or adds an extension or header formats at all!

Update: 27 Oct, ref my statement at the top of this post: Actually we could just call those two songs "Oktalyzer pre v1.1 Format" :-)




Website for Shining 8
http://www.shining8.de/ (Not much on there, back soon it says)

Some good information on DemoZoo: https://demozoo.org/groups/3436/

So, we go ahead and check the last instance on the old webpage in 2016 (back soon k is kind of late to tell us now, its been almost 3 years already). https://web.archive.org/web/20160210133611/http://www.shining8.de/

Both sites don't contain any traces of "The 8 Voices Soundtracker" though.

They also appear to have a FaceBook entry, but I dont care about that Facebook shit, so you can discover that yourselves if you _REALLY_ need to, I wont refer to anything on messed up social media junkyard. I deal only with QUALITY, not pure smelly slow sirup trash blended with advertisement and pretty much all the junk that SuckerBurg can squeeze into a single webpage, uhh.