Oktalyzer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia. Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.(December 2007) |
Oktalyzer is a so-called tracker - an old-fashioned way of composing music on computers. It is a commercial product written for the Amiga computer by the German developer Armin Sander and distributed by Mayer Verlag in 1988. The latest version (1.57) was published in 1991.
Oktalyzer was probably the first tracker that was able to do software mixing of audio channels. For each of the four audio channels available on the Amiga, you could choose to have normal playback or two downmixed virtual channels, at the expense of reduced audio quality. This way it was possible to play up to eight channels in total, but the decreased audio quality and required processing power made software mixing unusable in most cases.
Oktalyzer had a bigger and more intuitive user interface than most trackers at that time, but it also suffered from severe limitations like the inability to address add-on soundcards or utilize any extra processing power of faster CPUs. Also, Oktalyzer does not work on modern add-on graphics boards.
