Stone Oakvalley's Amiga Music Collection (SOAMC=)
The automated Commodore Amiga Music converted to MP3/FLAC recordings! Download now!


                    
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No news = Good news?
in All about SOAMC= | Friday, April 20, 2018 | 21:09


Well, its been some loooooong years in silence haven't it?


Allthough, I always said that if we were to record more tunes for the Amiga, it would require a new total approach of finding tunes than these 3 options we went for during the first SOAMC= and the SOAMC= REDUX (add-on recordings) performed back in 2010. A whole whopping 8 years ago already!

In fact, the idea for SOAMC= and recording Amiga Music came to life 22 Feb 2007.

1: Download complete collections, ready structured, ready to index/record.
2: Scan some copies of CD's and use that as a recording base for structure and index.
3: Manually go through disks ourselves and hunt for more tunes, even those cranky obscure players and software and record manually with pain and horror.

Point 1,2 was the original SOAMC=.
Point 3 was the SOAMC= REDUX.

What else could we do now?

What about more sophisticated scanning, extraction and organzing almost completetly automatic?

Yeah, but that would take a massive amount of extraction techniques, scanning, indexing and coding clever automatic scripts and tools to do all that very hard work, would it not?

To let in you in on a little secret, my already created SOTDS (Stone Oakvalley's Text Database Searcher) software suite was created with indexing files and directories in all kinds of archived files. And, yes, the "AmigaFiles" database I already have released in several versions (that contained hundreds of millions of search words) have more potentional that what one could think of really.

So, what does that mean for future recordings into SOAMC= again?

Well, since November 2017 until April 2018, my automatic scripts and tools have been running a mix between Windows software and WinUAE to create checksums for 28millions files in my Amiga-Files Archive. The time from 2011-until now was basically just downloading whatever Amiga related files I could find, its a never ending project, but everything are scanned/indexed and put into my SOTDS database.

What kind of checksums, you say?
Well, the regular MD5 checksum will be there naturally, but also 2 custom strings-of-data was created:

1: The first 12 bytes from every file as a hex string.
2: A special 1080-1083, 4 bytes from every file as a hex string.

That, my friends, will allow us to quickly search for any kind of header of files that are pictures (FORM), executables, music files (non-soundtracker, but like music formats that begins with a same header always).

The other special 1080-1083 position is specifically targeted at SoundTracker modules, as they have 4 bytes as "M.K.", "FLT4", "M!K!", etc.

Yeah, you say, Oakvalley you dumbass, some of the music files might be compressed? No problem, we'll just hunt the header then for "PP20", "XPKF" etc. and we get suspects of compressed files :-)

There are no limitations of what we kind do with this kind of indexed data really.

We can even extract and filter out any executable file, run that through "XFDDecruncher" on WinUAE to unpack every file, and then, we can hunt for music formats, we can hunt for SoundTracker tags, like "M.K." etc.

In fact, Waxhead have during the last 2 weeks made his own tracker hunter which slides through every executable files, trying to find typical SoundTracker set of data and extract those files out.

So, there you have the current state of affair in the SOAMC= world. You might think I ended Amiga Recordings in 2010, but really, in 2011, the database system (SOTDS) was started and coding took over 3 years before it was usefull. A couple of years later, we are right here, right now, to combine forces of good to produce most likely new recordings based on our techniques.

We could probably conclude that this will be our "ENDGAME" of hunting down those last bits of lost Amiga music (hopefully) from 28millions files, as I'm sure nobody would ever attempt such crazy things we have been doing since 2011.


We'll start posting more news when we feel ready to inform about it during 2018.

Much of it will be stories, examples, ranting, various side-effects/benefits of the project. And to keep the boiling pot still burning: Whatever music files we release, are *NOT* allowed to post/upload/talk about/link to in relation to AMP.DASCENE.NET.

haha, just kidding. You might remember they told us "we cannot download tunes from their database and record those for SOAMC=". ehh? Excuse me? Oh ok, but I will link back to your fine website to promote you also. Wouldn't that be nice?

End story: We are not allowed to use their organized database and that was it. As such fine gentlemen we are, we accepted that "rule" and never recorded anything from their obviously copyrighted database for Public Domain material. Ehh, PD, reality check anyone? Whatever :-)

And hey: Here's the real fucker. We will not deny ANYBODY to do whatever with the tunes we dig up in our new recording project, upload and spread whereever you want, thats just how the spirit of REAL AMIGAIANS are. Regards from Norway, that not so "shit-hole country" really!

I told you we're gonna rant, and that even about "AMP.DASCENE.NET" was almost 10 years ago. See, we're still the same people we was in 2007 when we started SOAMC= so naturally we have the same energy and beliefs today for the "SOAMC= ENDGAME".


I once said:
"A legend must rest as a legend should rest, otherwise it's not a legend!"

But there's no stopping me from saying a phrase like:
"The Return of the Legend" :-)

Amiga Lives 4Ever!




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Posted by: Old-schooler, Stone Oakvalley | Publisher: Crazy Multi Talent, Stone Oakvalley
Last revised: December 07, 2022 - 17:35 | Page views: 1607


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