Christmas 2021 was approaching fast and it was clear to me that I’d miss the magic release date again. Sigh. I had been working on the Rave audio editor for well over two years, and you can imagine how frustrated I was that I still wasn’t ready to put out a working version, with all the features I had envisioned for the initial public release. Worse: I began to fear that – despite documenting the development process on this blog and posting screenshots on Facebook – some of my followers might have got sceptical enough to believe that the program is nothing but vaporware! Luckily, around the same time I got an e-mail from Roman ‘kas1e’ Kargin, one of the driving forces behind several exciting AmigaOS4 developments. Roman’s message read along the lines of “Hey, how about you send me a demo and I’ll make a video of it, showing the program in action?”

I hadn’t thought about making a video myself because, first, I lack the skills and experience to do so and, second, such a task would only eat more of my precious time for Amiga programming. But I knew that a video is worth a thousand screenshots, so I gladly accepted Roman’s offer and waited eagerly for the outcome. He released the video on Boxing Day, and as it appears now, I couldn’t have hoped for better timing. The festive period always brings a lot of expectations in the Amiga camp, so there was a chance that some big news would steal all the attention. But last year’s Christmas was rather short on major OS4 releases, so I was happy to see that the video got noticed all right. In case you haven’t seen it:

Now that Roman’s video has shown that Rave is alive and well, you may be wondering what the actual hold up is. In all honesty, the main culprit is my perfectionist self. I know the advantages of the “release early and improve later” approach, but that’s not how I work. I hate to release something that I don’t consider good enough, and while I understand that the notion of “good enough” is relative and subjective, this is simply how I felt about Rave towards the end of the year. Not that the program suffered from major quirks, but there was one missing feature that – if the editor got released – would surely attract negative comments, making Rave look worse than it is. That missing feature was MP3 support.

“No MP3 you say? Unthinkable!” The reason why Rave wasn’t ready to handle the popular format is that it wasn’t supported by libsndfile, the audio library used by my editor’s I/O module. At that point, Fraunhofer’s MPEG audio patents had already expired but although the main obstacle was gone, the author of the library didn’t seem to care. I was contemplating writing my own MP3 handling routines when a forum post mentioned that one of the new libsndfile maintainers had finally started looking into it. This sounded like good news! A new public version was finally released in January 2021, and guess what – MP3 support was still missing. “Never mind, it’ll come later in the year,” I thought. And then suddenly Christmas was around the corner, and it was clear that Rave would unfortunately have to stay on the back burner a little longer.

Nevertheless, the positive feedback I received after Roman’s video appeared on his YouTube channel gave me a little push. Shortly after New Year’s Day I contacted Fredrik Wikstrom and asked if he could port the latest non-public version of libsndfile for me. I estimated my chances as rather slim because Fredrik, on top of being a core AmigaOS4 developer, is busy working on his own projects. Well, he got back to me three days later and didn’t even bother to say “yes” – he sent me the ported library right away! It wasn’t the first time Fredrik had helped me, so I didn’t hesitate to visit his website again and use the Donate button at the bottom of the page. Really, it’s people like Fredrik who embody the wonderful Amiga spirit, and I’m eternally grateful to them for keeping the boat afloat.

Using a non-public, under-tested version of a library written for a different operating system was, naturally, a bit of a gamble. But I’m happy to say that things went smoother than I had expected. Now that the last missing piece was in place, adding MP3 support in the editor was just a matter of a few lines of code. One great thing about using a library like libsndfile is that when a new audio file type is added, Rave will automatically benefit from the addition. The version sent by Fredrik also came with an unexpected bonus: the Opus format (a relatively new member of the Ogg family), and MP3’s less successful predecessor MPEG Audio Layer II, better known as MP2. So after a simple re-compile of my I/O module, Rave added three new audio formats in one go! The current number of supported file types is nineteen – I wonder if there’s an Amiga editor that could top that?

So what’s left to be done, and how far are we from getting the thing out of the door?

There are a few things I’m working on at the moment. First of all, saving needs configuration code and GUI for the individual formats, which I’ve been adding one by one. Only major audio formats are going to be supported in the initial versions of the program; saving in less common formats will come at a later point if there’s interest. Tracker musicians will probably be pleased to hear that saving in the legacy IFF-8SVX format is already implemented, though only in mono for the time being. (Given the cherished image of the Amiga as “the world’s first multimedia computer”, it is hard to believe that Electronic Arts’ original IFF specification didn’t consider stereo waveforms – support for them was only added later by a third party. Unfortunately, IFF files store stereo data in a non-standard way that libsndfile doesn’t support, so I need to write my own saver. Oh bother!)

To add insult to injury, one of my testers has reported certain memory-related problems on his Sam460, which we’re currently looking into. To this end I’ve dug up my old Sam440ep-Flex from storage and re-installed it so that I have one more machine for testing; I really want Rave to work plausibly across the OS4 hardware range. With its low specs the Sam is more suitable for simulating dire memory conditions (you simply run out of RAM more quickly) compared to my X5000, and I’ve already fixed an out-of-memory problem that my trusty old computer helped reveal. So things are looking up and if no more roadblocks come in the way, the Rave editor should hit the wild in a couple of weeks. As usual: stay tuned and watch this space.