★ APPLICATIONS ★ CREATION MUSICAL ★ PC SOUND FILE PLAYER OCTWAVER ★ |
| PC Sound File Player Octwaver | Applications Creation Musical |
Octwaver is a rather nifty little program for playing PC sounds on your humble CPC. It's a bit like Digitracker, which was reviewed in AA100, only instead of transferring music modules from the Amiga, this program transfers high quality sound files from the PC. Octwaver is very simple to use. All you have to do is to load your PC sound samples into the program, then it does the rest. Both binary files and ASCII files can be used, although a major drawback is that files that don't fit into the normal CPC RAM cause a crash - the program makes nc use of the 6128's second 64k. The 8-bit samples of the PC are. of course, reduced to 4-bit samples when used through the CPC's internal speaker, which does sometimes result in a slight loss of quality. Even so, the results are absolutely outstanding. They are certainly light years ahead of the 1-bit samples produced by the tape samplers we're used to (which are, in comparison, nothing but a load of noise). Octwaver is a shareware program and you'd be well advised to pay the tiny sum of £3 as many benefits will be bestowed upon such honest people. Not least of these is the author's offer to give free PC sound and conversion tools to registered users. Many samples contain control characters which can cause considerable problems when used in AmsDOS. By using the pre-processor under MSDOS PC such problems are avoided. For true sound fanatics its also possible to purchase a gadget called a Digiblaster for only £15, which allows you to play incredible 8-bit sound samples on your CPC. The really useful thing about all this is that it's very easy to play the samples in your own programs, using any delay (change in the sample's speed) you want. As well as the full English instructions, an example program is included to show you how to do this. Octwaver is probably the best new utility to be released this year. You really will not be able to believe that these hieh aualitv sounds are Amstrad Action
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