REALLY SOUND SAMPLER

by Daniel Azzopardi



Yes, its another sound sampler. Yes, it'll actually work this time.

But no, it's not just the same as all the others. It is, in fact, much

better. The main difference is that Daniel Azzopardi (Does he? Where?

Ed) has incorporated lots of 128K features into it. He says that not

only can you record samples up to 96K long (which is roughly three and

a half weeks of recording time, according to my calculations), but the

program also takes advantage of the dear old AY sound chip. I'm not

quite sure what he means by this second bit, but I've a sneaky

suspicion it might be something to do with the different volumes you

can play things back at. It also boasts variable frequencies and a

sort of graph thing, like at the beginning of Angels. (You know! That

crap BBC drama about nurses where everybody died!) But all of this

doesn't make it a 128K-only program. It'll work fine on 48K Speccies

too, but without quite so many features.



Before you start worrying about how it all works and everything, the

first thing to do is get it up and running. To do that, type in the

BASIC section of the program and save it with SAVE "sampler" LINE 720.

Then you'll have to load up the Hex Loader and type in the Hex

listing. (Oh no! Several thousand rapidly dispersing Pitstop readers!)

Save the code produced after the BASIC part and there you are.



Upon running the sampler, lots of writing will appear, along with a

little line that moves slowly along the bottom of the screen. That's

your graph thingy, which will jiggle up and down if you play something

through the ear socket. (The ear socket being where you play in what

you want to sample, of course.)



I won't bother listing all the keys the program uses, as it displays

them all on the screen for you. The extra 128K functions might need

some explaining though. Keys 1 and 2 swap between the various 16K

pages of memory, so you can store a sample in each. G, on the other

hand, "glues" all the pages together into one long sample. E does an

echo (echo, e c h o) effect, which apparently works best with small

samples.



Don't expect to be bowled over by the sound quality or anything, but I

defy anyone to come up with a better Speccy sampler. (Although if you

do, you'll have to wait a few months to see it in print, as I've had

it up to here with samplers for the time being.)