Stein Eikesdal (a.k.a. Stone Oakvalley) is a guy that you will learn to love because of two of his latest projects.
Allegedly the “largest MP3 archives in the world of Commodore Amiga and Commodore 64 music” (a bold claim which is probably true!), the SOASC (Stone Oakvalley’s Authetic SID Collection) and SOAMC (Stone Oakvalley’s Amiga Music Collection) are a huge music repository for lovers of these two cool oldschool platforms, as well as two cool domain names :D
Recorded with meticulous detail, from real machines and using the best replaying software possible (you can read details of the process here and here.
), these archives contain thousands of songs for your lascivious delectation and you don’t need special tools to play good old MP3s. In the case of the Amiga he even blended the hard panned stereo nature of the machine’s audio channels. You are saved!
The C64 archive has everything the High Voltage SID collecion has, each tune recorded in 3 or 4 flavours (different 6581 revisions, and 8580). The Amiga archive has been formed from places like Exotica, Modland and AMP, recorded using Eagleplayer, depending on the replayer that was needed. Everything was calculated precisely to get the best recording possible. In both cases, he also coded some tools to automate the process and leave it running literally for MONTHS until all music was accounted for.
I leave you with a video introduction of the Amiga archive:
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/brFLSz66ULM" width="425" height="344" allowfullscreen="true" fvars="fs=1" /]
Wow this is great! Maybe someday we can get the lossless versions too!
hehe, that’s what i was thinking too. these are such amazing projects, but it’s a shame that the final result is, i guess, dated. it’s as if everything else is perfect. but i’m puzzled about his “custom stereo” mixes of amiga tunes, instead of mono…?
Here’s hoping that lossless audio is some intermediate state that is archived for some point when bandwidth is much cheaper.