Amiga

Amiga Oktalyzer tracker v1.57

by Armin Sander

Oktalyzer was a commercial tracker 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 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 for situations where CPU consumption was an issue, such as games and demos.

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.

Here is a song made in Oktalyzer in 4-channel mode.

Screens

Main page

Large friendly file requester

Cool block selection with both mouse and keyboard

Built-in sample editor with a few handy effects

For each track you could select "normal" or "doubled" mode, in order to reach anything from 4 to 8 channels. Using the doubled mode degraded the sound quite a lot though.

The file dialogs had multi-select, so that you could easily load multiple samples at once.

Built-in help pages with hotkeys

Website by Joachim Michaelis