A SAMPLER THAT WORKS

by Daniel Cannon



And I know it does because I've heard it. You may remember there was

another sampler in Pitstop a year or two ago, and you may also be one

of the people who sent an angry letter of complaint in when you found

it didn't work (the probability that you are is approximately one in

three). The problems were due to a hitch at our end rather than

anything to do with the program itself, but as it was a bit beyond

repair I've decided to print this one by Daniel Cannon (of Minstrel

fame) in the hope that it'll pacify you all a bit. It works, and

what's more it's extremely good.



Instructions

To avoid the risk of another hex dump disaster, the program's in

Basic, with lots of nice Data statements for you to type in. So bash

it in and save it with SAVE "Sampler" LINE 10. Run it, wait for it to

sort out the machine code and you'll be presented with a line moving

slowly across the bottom of the screen. Now try playing some music or

something through the ear socket from your tape deck. Behold! The line

moves up and down, drawing a graph of the input. Now, if you press R,

sound will be recorded into the computer's memory for about five and a

half seconds. Then press P to play it back. Amazing, eh? You can also

change the length of the sample recorded by pressing T and typing in a

number of bytes. This number is calculated as the number of seconds'

recording time multiplied by 5500 (so use 11000 for two seconds). And

you can load and save samples so that they can be used in your own

programs.



To use samples in your own programs, you'll need a CLEAR 32767

statement, a LOAD "" CODE 32768 to load in your sample and a RANDOMIZE

USR 32829 to play it. Samples are saved with a copy of the playback

routine built in, which is pretty handy. You can also change the

length of the sample from within your program by doing:

POKE 32834,time-256*INT (time/256)

POKE 32835,INT (time/256)

Do this lots of times for the old N-N-N-Nineteen effect and all that

sort of rubbish.