Interview with OctaMED's new developer: Gerd Frank

edited by Francis G. Loch

Tell us a bit about yourself and your history with the Amiga.

I am 30 years old, working for several companies as a freelancer, although not just in the computer business. Living in Germany or better Bavaria! There are not only beer drinkers here, some guys are doing real hard work! And I have a very, very nice and lovely 24 year old girlfriend. She claims most of my time, not only free time. But that's good so... Ok, enough by now! ;^)

I bought my first Amiga in 1986, an A1000 of course. With some very expensive equipment over the years the next thing (about 1990) was an A3000, only some months later an A3000T and as it became available an A4000T. From time to time I bought some other machines like an A1200, A2000 and A4000 mainly for video/audio editing and testing purposes. And, of course, a DraCo Cube was used too. But, except for my A3000UX, I sold all the hardware stuff the last three years or so ago. Only my very big software archive is still alive here, could be about 4 cubic metres of good old originals! I still like it! ;^) I sold the hardware because of changing interests and quite a lack of time. And hopefully to get a new Amiga .........

How did you get started on taking over the development of OctaMED SoundStudio?

Quite the same story with AmiATLAS by the way!

As always I talked with Olaf Köbnik from Amiga Arena, someone mentioned OMSS and Olaf said the development stopped only days ago. So here we go...

First I wanted to start over with the development of another well known and popular tracker, but again lack of time kicked me out very fast. Another thing is OctaMed is surely much easier to transfer to other platforms because of its C code.

But all development is done in my very rarely free time so please don't expect too much!!!

What plans do you currently have for OctaMED?

It was hard enough to get all the sources (some are still lost!) working again with the compiler (currently SAS C 6.58 is still being used), some smaller parts had to be rewritten completely. Next thing is to convert the 300KB of Asm sources (player/mixer routines and some other stuff) to C, then converting all the sources to GCC. And then get it fully working with OS4 and MOS of course.

I already did a new player in purely C code but it only works with about 4 tracks fast enough, so forget about it. Ok it was 68k only so for the forthcoming PPC release it should work much better. But we will see...

Before someone asks: Yes, the (next) new player/mixer will support AHI, and only this! Dealing with the old support libs for e.g. Toccata, WaveTools, etc. is no option for the future.

By the way, the actual OMSS release works quite well with the OS4 beta, but only the 68k parts were tested here. Hopefully in some weeks I will get my Pegasos/MOS too!

The incompatibility issue of the NSM package with the new OctaMED update is obviously a big problem which will prevent a lot of people from upgrading. Any comments on this?

As NSM is more of a hack it needs the executable it was made for because of its addressing so please use the old v1.03c of OctaMed. All other things are impossible to do so please don't even ask! But hopefully I can integrate the features in a future release...

And as no real changes are made inside the actual release this should be no problem for all the musicians out there!

Any plans for a PPC native version for systems like the Amiga One and MorphOS?

No plans, it's the only solution! Both ways: OS4 and MOS!

Because the default GUI of OS4 is ReAction and inside MOS its MUI the only base of both OS'es is to use Gadtools within OMSS as already known. Of course this could change in the future (far away!).

Where do you see OctaMED being in the future?

On Amiga?! ;^)

I have no real plans for a mega-monster perfect Audio/MIDI sequencer. It will do its job as tracker with MIDI support doing some good music quite fast. Another thing is I do not have the time to do so much requested features. And still I am not paid for anything its just for everyone´s pleasure!

If you have other interests use the forthcoming new DigiBoosterPro from APC & TCP or the new Bars'n'Pipes from Alfred Faust. By the way, he is currently doing a very hard and very good job for the future regarding Amiga and audio!

Thank you for your time.

Thanks for yours!

Gerd Frank can be contacted at mainactor@gmx.net

RBF Software can be contacted at rbfsoftware@med.uk.com or visit the official OctaMED website at http://www.med.uk.com

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