@DATABASE AmigaMail @NODE MAIN "VI-1: Creating Virtual Voices with Amiga Audio" @TOC "Table_of_Contents/VI" Creating Virtual Voices with Amiga Audio by Dan Baker Every Amiga model comes standard with 4-channel, 8-bit stereo audio hardware. This hardware provides every application with the capability of producing 4-part, stereo sound. Some applications however may want to exceed the 4-channel limit. For games and other applications that use sound effects extensively, it may be desirable to trigger more than 4 sounds simultaneously. This article demonstrates two techniques you can use to implement virtual voices on the Amiga's audio hardware effectively doubling the number of voices available to 8. Audio Hardware Limits Using DMA, the audio hardware can fetch about 2 bytes per scan line for each channel without processor intervention. This means that each audio channel can play back sampled data at up to 28,867 bytes per second. It turns out that this 28,867 byte per second limit far exceeds the requirements of most audio sample files. The typical 8SVX file contains data sampled at a rate of about 10,000 bytes per second. In that case, the audio hardware only uses about 1/3 of the available audio bandwidth. The audio hardware is capable of fetching much more sound data without affecting system performance. The question then arises, can this extra horsepower be harnessed in some way? The answer is yes. Audio Interleaving An application can use any extra audio bandwidth to interleave the bytes from two separate sample files. This technique allows an application to play both samples simultaneously on a single audio channel. For instance, if you have two files sampled at 10,000 bytes per second, you could set the playback speed to 20,000 bytes per second and alternate playing bytes from each sample. The effective speed of each sample is preserved since each sample is output only half the time. @{" Figure 1 - Interleaved audio data " link "VI-1/fig1.ilbm/MAIN"} As shown in the diagram above, an application interleaves the data bytes from two sound files into a memory buffer. The application then plays the back the interleaved sample at twice the rate. Note that for this method to work, the speeds of the two samples should be the same, or at least a close match. Another restriction is that the sample speed must be no more than half the maximum speed available on the Amiga. Since the playback speed has to be doubled for interleaving to work and since the speed limit of the Amiga's built in audio hardware is 28,867 bytes per second, the speed limit of each interleaved sample is 14,433 bytes per second. The biggest advantage of audio interleaving is that it exploits unused audio bandwidth available on the Amiga hardware. Also, interleaving does not effect the values of the sampled sound data. The individual sound samples remain in their original, noninterleaved form. The disadvantage is interleaving certain wave forms can combine into an unexpected and undesirable wave form. Consider the following two wave forms: @{" Figure 2 - Wave Forms " link "VI-1/fig2.ilbm/MAIN"} When the Amiga interleaves these two wave forms, it has to alternate between wave form A and wave form B. Because the Amiga is constantly oscillating between two wave forms, it produces a completely different wave form: @{" Figure 3 - Wave Form " link "VI-1/fig3.ilbm/MAIN"} In practice, this usually isn't a problem if you are working with sampled sound. Typically, sampled sounds are not pure periodic wave forms (like the wave forms above). Audio Averaging It is not always possible to interleave two samples. For example, the frequency of a sample may be more than 14,433 bytes per second, so doubling it would exceed the 28,867 bytes per second limit. In that case, there is another trick you can do to the audio data to combine two samples on one channel. If the values from each sample file are added and the resulting value is divided by two, a new data stream can be created which contains the audio information from both files. @{" Figure 4 - Averaged output data " link "VI-1/fig4.ilbm/MAIN"} Note that in the example above, data values are represented as signed bytes in the range -128 to +127 using twos complement format. The resulting average values are correct as shown. Even though the ioa_Data field of the IOAudio structure used for all audio.device requests is shown as (UBYTE *) in the include file , do not be misled. The data values are signed bytes. Audio averaging introduces some noise into the resulting combined signal. Dividing the summed values by two effectively reduces the dynamic range of the component samples by one bit (from eight to seven bits). Also, when the values are divided by two, any fractional amount is truncated, hence, some information is lost. Despite these drawbacks, the results of audio averaging on the Amiga's eight bit audio hardware are comparable to the interleaving technique described above. In fact, the two techniques are virtually indistinguishable on the current generation of Amigas (although this may not always be true--see the ``Audio Experiments'' section later in this article). Virtual Voices When two samples are combined on a single channel using interleaving or averaging, both samples are clearly audible but, subjectively, it sounds as if one bit of volume control has been lost on each sample. Because of this, it is not wise to carry these virtual voice techniques to an extreme. Combining samples without limit will result in a badly degraded composite in which the component signals are no longer clearly audible. It is however quite feasible to double the number of available voices to 8 using interleaving or averaging techniques. The loss of fidelity with 8 virtual voices is quite tolerable. The code listed below shows how this can be implemented. Using the Interplay Program The program, named @{"interplay.c" link "VI-1/interplay.c/MAIN"}, allows the playback of standard IFF 8SVX files in three different ways: 1. Normal playback of a single file on one channel 2. Interleaved playback of two files on one channel 3. Averaged playback of two files on one channel For normal playback of a single 8SVX file, enter the following command at the Shell prompt: 1>interplay sample.8svx This feature allows you to find out how a sample sounds alone as compared with its interleaved or averaged counterpart. For playback of two 8SVX files on a single channel using interleaving, enter the following command at the Shell prompt: 1>interplay voice.8svx music.8svx The program reads the two files, figures out which has the faster sampling rate, and sets the audio device to twice that value. If the calculated rate exceeds the maximum of 28,867 bytes per second, then interplay sets the speed to the maximum. The program then interleaves the data from the two files so that the bytes played by the audio channel alternate from one file to the other. If the data from one file runs out before the other, any remaining data bytes are interleaved with zero. For playback of two 8SVX files on a single channel using averaging, enter the following command at the Shell prompt: 1>interplay voice.8svx music.8svx SUM The ``SUM'' keyword enables averaging instead of interleaving. In this case, the speed is set to whichever file uses the faster playback rate. One byte is taken from each file, the two bytes are added and then divided by two. The resulting average value is played back. If the data from one file runs out before the other, any remaining data bytes are averaged with zero. Interplay can play samples of any size. If a sample is too long, you can terminate playback by pressing Ctrl-C. How Interplay Works Interplay uses a double-buffered approach for the playback of samples of arbitrary length. While one data buffer is playing, the other data buffer is being prepared using either the averaging or interleaving technique descried above. Most of the code in the main loop within main() is concerned with switching between one of the two playback buffers and their corresponding I/O request blocks and message ports. The averaging or interleaving of bytes actually takes place in the FillAudio() subroutine, not in main(). The reading and parsing of the 8SVX file are handled by the Parse8svx() subroutine which takes as a parameter an InterPlay structure. The InterPlay struture holds all the state information that the program needs to manage playback of the sampled data. Thus there will be one filled-in InterPlay structure for each file to be played back. If the user requests a combined playback, the two InterPlay structures are linked together via the InterPlay.next_iplay field. Otherwise this field is set to NULL. Housekeeping for the audio.device channels used is handled by the SiezeChannel() and ReleaseChannel() subroutines. Audio Experiments Using the interplay.c program listed below, we found that there was very little difference in the audio quality between the two methods of combining samples. We also found that for best results, the dynamic ranges within the samples themselves had to be closely matched or the result would be one sample drowning out the other. Of course, it also helps if the speeds are a close match. If they aren't then one or the other of the samples will be too slow or too fast. Although both of these methods work comparitively well on the Amiga's eight-bit audio hardware, doing the same tricks with 16-bit samples on 16-bit hardware would yield a different result. As mentioned earlier, the drawback of the averaging method is it loses a bit from the dynamic range of the sound samples. Compared to eight-bit sound, this loss is much less significant when working with 16-bit sound. As the dynamic range increases, the impact of losing a single bit from the dynamic range decreases. On the other hand, the drawback to the interleaving method is that it has to oscillate between two samples, which produces a waveform equal to the sample playback rate. The waveform is independent of the dynamic range, so it remains constant as the dynamic range increases. The result is the avaeraging method will produce superior results on systems with greater dynamic range. Perhaps the best thing about the audio techniques demonstrated by interplay.c is that they are not limited to the Amiga architecture. In fact, you can use interleaving and averaging with any system that supports the variable speed playback of digitally sampled audio. These methods will work not only in the current generation of Amigas but in any future system that support digital audio, although as the dynamic range increases, the additive method will provide superior sound quality. @ENDNODE