OctaMED

OctaMED is a popular music tracker for the Commodore Amiga, written by Teijo Kinnunen. The first version, 1.12, was released in 1989 under the name MED, which stands for Music EDitor. In April 1990, version 2.00 was released with MIDI support as the main improvement. In 1991 the first version with the name OctaMED was released, so-called as it could replay eight independent channels on the Amiga's four-channel sound chip. This was also the first commercial version of the software. The publisher throughout has been RBF Software of Southampton, UK which is run by Ray Burt-Frost.

The distinguishing feature of MED and OctaMED in comparison to other music trackers on the Amiga was that MED and OctaMED had native MIDI support for external instruments via the Amiga's serial port – this allowed many musicians to sequence a combination of outboard studio equipment and internally generated sounds to create studio quality releases such as "I Created Disco" by Calvin Harris.

OctaMED was chiefly used by musicians to create stand-alone works, rather than by game or demo musicians to make tunes that play in the context of a computer game or demo.

The technique of playing more channels of music than the Amiga hardware was capable of was first introduced with Jochen Hippel's "Hippel 7V" routine, which used code initially developed for the Atari ST to perform software mixing of 4 channels to a single output, played back alongside the remaining three Amiga hardware sound channels. The seven-channel routine then appeared in a tracker called TFMX. Finally, the routine was optimised so it could mix an additional channel, resulting in eight channels of sound. This playback method was suited for instances where a number of samples that don't require fidelity can be played through the software mixed channel, and cleaner samples through the remaining three hardware channels.

OctaMED took a different approach, where two software-mixed channels are played through each of the four hardware audio channels. This brings some limitations, such as paired software channels sharing some effects such as hardware volume control, the higher-quality playback routine requires a more powerful CPU, and some louder samples can sound distorted due to limitations in the mixing process.

OctaMED was developed on the Amiga until 1996. The last version, called OctaMED Soundstudio, had features like MIDI file support, ARexx support, support for 16-bit and stereo samples, hard disk recording, and support for up to 64 channels.