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ST-xx as Wave Blog
23rd August 2019
Oh, boy, the complexities of Amiga Day!!!

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First up, I grabbed the entire /mods/inst folder from Aminet, and then realised the ST-xx sample packs were included there.
Woot!!

ST-xx are a collection of disks/archives containing sound samples for use in SoundTracker (hence the ST-)
There are over 100 such archives, ranging from ST-01 through to ST-b6, each with a whole bunch of little audio samples.

I'd forgotten, though, that Amiga sounds were in .iff format, (d'oh!)
Although OpenMPT CAN open .iff files, they (for some reason) won't show up in the Instrument Library, so they're not quite as quick to access and flick through.

But thankfully the conversion process to .wav was relatively painless... Once I decided to do it my bloomin' self.

First I scoured the net for a decent audio converter, but everything needed the audio samples to have proper headers.
.. Not all (very few!) of the samples had proper headers, so the batch converters would often pop up little requesters asking for the sound format.
On every single bloomin' file..

Nope.. Can't have that.

So, a simple-enough script was coded in BlitzMax, which ran through the raw data of the files, stripped out the .iff header (if the .iff HAD a header), replaced it with a generic .wav header (set at 11025, 8-bit, mono), and spat it back out again.

It then did that for the entire ST-xx collection, but removing any samples larger than 15kb. (I doubt I'll ever be needing large drumloops, vocal samples and such.)

I'm not sure what the legal implications are of hosting these, but if anyone wants them, here they are in .wav format, until someone complains!
STxx_Wave.zip - A 38Mb .zip file containing about 9,000 low resolution .wav samples from back in the Amiga Days.

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Note 1. Nothing over 15kb has been included.

Note 2. All data has been stripped, so loop settings and even default sample rates, are no longer included in the files.

Note 3. Some of the smaller chippy samples seemed to glitch out. I don't think my script could handle the tiny size of the file that well!

Note 4. Due to my own dumb stupidity, I mass-deleted the original .iff folders once I no longer needed them. .. And in those folders? My bloomin' converter script. *sigh* If I ever need that again, I'm going to have to redo-from-start!
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