Music Studio/IFF
This message turned up in search, but its forum couldn’t be identified from the original transcript, so it may not be linked into its thread.
By "channel", I am referring to the actual physical D/A port used for
generating the music. IFF allows one to specify TRAK, but has no
requirements that a particular trak be played on a particular channel. With
MIDI, this is the case. With the Amiga's internal channels, it uses the
channel allocation mechanism to get a free channel whenever it needs to
play a note. While this is very nice for keeping other Amiga programs
using the sound stuff happy, it makes stereo sound impossible. since there
is no way to determine which channel any particular note will be on.
The proper method of accessing sound channels is to allocate them and NOT
free them up, but rather keep the priority set appropriately and check to
see if the channel was stolen before playing any note. This way, you can
force notes to particular channels, and retain a stereo effect. But it
makes note handling that much more difficult. –>Steve Bennett