Sound files on a 68000 Compact Macintosh?

[jake18125]

I suppose a lot of people have asked this, but I've never found something that works properly. 

Does anyone know of a method of playing common -ish sound files (midi, mod or perhaps even wav files, but not something like converting them to system 7 sounds) on a 68000 compact mac?

The closest I've gotten is running .mod files on my Powerbook 100 (a 68000 running at 16mhz) with Macintosh Tracker 1.2, but trying the exact same program and files on my Classic results in... silence. 

I don't expect CD quality audio, just a few bleeps and bloops! 

(also Concertware midi player isn't able to read midi files. I have a feeling it expects a proprietary format)

 

[Byrd]

Play around with SoundEdit and uncompressed AIFF files (or better yet a later PPC that runs SoundEdit 16 for speed).  File sizes matter here but if you downsample to mono, 11khz it's passable.

 

[jake18125]

I'll try that! I imagine you mean running SoundEdit 1.1 on the 68000, and SoundEdit 16 to downsample the AIFF files on a more powerful Macintosh (like my powerbook G3)?

 

[jake18125]

Holy moly it worked! Turned the sampling down to 11khz, converted it to mono, booted my macintosh classic off the system 6 ROM disk and with SoundEdit 1.1 I got music!

Incredibly tinny and crunchy music, but music nevertheless!

Should work on my plus as well! 

 

[MrFahrenheit]

I just found this thread now. I should have chimed in earlier. 
 

Back in 1991 I wanted to record and playback sound just like the new LC and IIsi did, but I only had a Plus. So I bought a MacRecorder and used SoundEdit to record and playback music. It only worked at 11khz 8 bit but it did work. Thinking back it MAY have worked at 22khz but I just can’t remember for sure. 
 

All I know is, on my dual floppy setup, SoundEdit and a system folder fit on one 800kb floppy, and I could record and save about 3-4 minutes of audio on the other 800kb drive. Enough for most songs. So when I wanted to listen to music, I would insert a disk, and load the file, and press play. The original “MP3” player. 
 

Im glad you figured out your own music situation. 

 

[jake18125]

Yep! A very similar solution, but I'm using a 2gb SCSI2SD for storage, so I just have to worry about the 4mb ram limit!

I've also found for some reason soundedit 1.1 doesn't like to run on system 6.0.8 as it keeps running into errors, but system 6.0.3 works fine! 

And obviously system 7 just takes up too much resources... 

 

[MrFahrenheit]

I used System 6.0.4 back in the day.

Here's a story about SoundEdit and the MacRecorder:

http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/mac-recorder/4004

Reading over the specs of the unit itself on eBay ( https://www.ebay.com/c/2206848687 ) I believe it supported 22khz sound files.

 

[Byrd]

22khz mono will play back fine on a 68000, but due to file size you usually have to shorten the length of the music.

A story: my friend had a PowerBook 140 he used to play back 4 channel .MODS and I wanted to do the same, but was completely unable to do on a Mac Plus with a 20MB HD.  So I used to convert the .MOD files to AIFF and play them back that way.  The Mac Plus was connected to a single speaker and back then, I recall it sounded great.  I'm betting it wouldn't sound that hot now if I tried again.

JB

 

[Crutch]

11 kHz was sort of standard for longer samples back in the day to same space, right.  But all the relevant tools including earlier ones like SoundWave and the MacNifty (Impulse) Audio Digitizer, which was the sort of pre-MacRecorder standard (and which I ran on a 512k non-E circa 1989) supported 22 kHz.

It was possible to play back 4-channel .MOD files using Sound-Trecker (and probably other things) by the 030 era, I certainly remember doing so on my IIci when it was new.