Old Commodore Amiga music file: reborn
I think it was about 25+ years ago I had a Roland JV-30 Synthesizer and a Commodore Amiga computer. Plugged into each other. To cut to the chase, I recorded a number of musical pieces; both original and cover versions. I didn’t record the sound per se, but the digital representation of the notes (in MIDI files). They were multi-track too and I had carefully assigned instruments (sounds) to each channel/track.
There’s a HUGE problem with old Amiga things. The floppy diskette format is simply NOT readable on a modern PC or Mac. I had tossed my Amiga out decades ago, but not the diskettes.
Some years ago – maybe 15 – I drove to Keilor and bought a 2nd hand Amiga…just to read these disks! The guy had a garage full of the Amigas. When I got home, I was rapt to find it could read my decade+ old floppies.
I wasn’t out of the woods just yet. I still had to get the files from the Amiga on to a PC. From memory, it was fairly straightforward – using an olde world serial cable (!). But it worked.
Just recently I downloaded the free PC music creation software Cakewalk (by BandLab) and was very happy to discover it could read the old MIDI files. So I loaded up my favourite cover version that I had done back then. I had used a standard set of digital sounds (General MIDI) and was able to re-assign them on the PC.
The hardest bit was getting the free video-capture program to cleanly record the sound (true!). But I got there.
And here it is:
