I did this because my previous build A500 system was a 512MB chip machine, which was limiting what software I could play with on it. Most newer games and many applications expect 1MB CHIP memory, or degrade or remove features to work with 512k..

The previous build was an Amiga 500 using a Commodore A590 hard disk expansion, with the hard disk replaced with a SCSI to CF solution. You can read more about it here.

But sadly I didn't do much with it. 

Having the fully upgraded Amiga 500 with ACA500 plus, 030 accelerator, ethernet access, AmigaOS 3.2, next to it made it too easy to just use that instead. Much faster to use ADF files to install, reconfigurable memory, drive, soft kick kickstart switching, CF hard disk swapping for different Workbench versions, way more disk space, easier to transfer large amounts of music, demos and games to it too. 

Essentially, it has none of the older hassles that Amiga 500 ownership usually meant. Makes sense right? After all, that is why we do those upgrades - to make it easier to use.

I decided though that I need one original system, as it was originally released, with the Commodore provided expansion options like the A590 hard disk and A570 CD drive.

Over the past few years, I went to a lot of trouble to source a lot of music (and other) applications that I definitely couldn't afford back in the day. Having the manuals is critical, as many are impossible to use without the manuals.

My wife calls it "revenge purchasing" - buying things today that I really wanted, but couldn't afford or missed out on when I was younger. Doing such a purchase and feeling triumph by using it removes a long held desire or frustration from my mind - you could call it removing some long held unhappiness. It feels good! Perhaps you have the same feeling when you buy something you desired for a long time?

Music software like Sonix, Deluxe Music 2, Protracker, Bars N Pipes, Music-X, Sequencer One,  TFMX workstation, and so much more. Hardware like GVP DSS Audio sampling, Serial MIDI expansions, and more.

Just great Amiga application software loaded from original floppy disks or installed from floppy disks on the hard disk, as it was back in the day. (FYI the CD and Zip drive in the photo are connected to the A1200 next to the A500)

Amazingly, some of the application software I bought was brand new in box, never removed from the shrink wrap even! What a waste.

First, let me show Hippoplayer, a music player for Amiga 1.3 and above. It was released in 1994 at the end of the original Commodore Amiga era, and is still actively updated in 2026! 

It works great on my base Amiga 500 with A590, playing some wonderful classic Amiga tracked module (mod) files. It can play many other formats too!

The new 2026 version can even use MHI to playback Mp3's and decode complex S3M music files on the AmiGUS sound card released recently (i covered in a blog entry here). This even works on 1.3 apparently! 

I still plan to try the Workbench 1.3 MP3 support out on my Amiga 3000 in the future, as it has the AMIGus card installed, and it is a superkickstart system that can boot into 1.3 or 3.1.4 environments.

While I was loading up software onto my 1.3 Amiga 500 A590 from floppy disks, I enjoyed some classic Red Sector demos I used to watch in that era also, courtesy of a nearby Amiga 1200/030 system.

You can get better custom mod support with Delitracker (the 1.3 version) - it is the swiss army knife of mod players.

Delitracker supports 45 different mod formats(!), but this program has not been updated in a very long time on Amiga. You can get an old Windows version called Deliplayer also.

Hippoplayer and Delitracker are just music players though.

My dad provided us the first music creation software I used on the Amiga 500 back in 1989, called Sonix 2.0, from Aegis.

This software allowed traditional music composition with limited range of samples of common instruments included, with the ability to connect it to control MIDI devices:

Without a training in music theory, I was all at sea trying to work out how to use this software. 

My late younger brother was getting lessons to learn to play Piano at the time, and we had a Roland Piano and Roland MIDI device connected to it for this. 

This MIDI setup was then connected via MIDI serial port connection to Sonix on the Amiga 500, allowing my brother to save songs he played, and to play them back via the Roland MIDI device and Piano.

MIDI format itself is not using samples stored on the Amiga. The musical score is inputted from the MIDI device in real time and can be edited in Sonix. The notes play the pre-stored instruments stored in the Roland MIDI device (not the Amiga) and playback via the Piano.

You can also create music on Sonix using the small number of included samples with Sonix. This will then playback using the Amiga's audio output, with 4 channel output (2 left and 2 right).

The next music creation software I saw on the Amiga was Quartet by Dan Lennard, which was released as a demo version on an Amiga magazine cover disk.

I managed to track down a boxed copy of the Quartet commercial product in recent years.

Quartet used its own custom music format, and to be honest I found the interface cool looking, but hard to use.

The software only runs from the floppy disk - no hard disk installation is possible.

Songs are presented as 4 channels (2 left, 2 right) horizontally across the screen. You enter notes in each channel, and assign a limited set of available samples for some very Amiga sounding songs!

As I mentioned, the interface looks cool, but a bit hard to use. And the playback locks the screen display, so there is no realtime showing of the audio being played.

After doing some research, I found out that Quartet was released on the Atari ST also, and that version had a different file format to the Amiga version! Example Quartet songs files are mostly written for the ST version from what I can find on the internet.

It was clear to me that I needed to look elsewhere for a music creation tool.

Another Amiga magazine cover disk music application then came my way in the form of Sequencer One. 

This software also allows MIDI control of instruments and recording of input from MIDI devices for editing and playback. It also allows importing of .MID files for playback and editing. 

This Sequencer One software quickly replaced Sonix in our place as it was much easier to configure and use. The MIDI file import function was very welcome indeed - it allowed me to load MIDI files from any source and playback via the Amiga.

These days I have a Roland SC-55 MIDI device to feed the MIDI output from the Amiga 500. 

Actually, I have two Amiga 500 systems, so I was playing around with connecting both to the same SC-55 device since it has two MIDI inputs. It works well! 

Sequencer One had its own file format (.ONE) for songs too, and those could be played back directly on the Amiga internal hardware, or using MIDI output. 

They released a number of sample packs separately, which I managed to locate recently!

In addition to this, there was an upgrade Sequencer One Plus available for those who got the cover disk from Amiga Format. I didn't get it back in the day as I couldn't afford it, but more recently I tracked down a boxed version of the Sequencer One Plus release, which upgrades the cover disk version. 

Sequencer One has multiple views to select from, which allows for music editing how you like it:

Personally, I find Sequencer One a great piece of software for the Amiga for composing music with MIDI.

I used it for over 30 years now for MIDI songs on the Amiga and still find it easy to use in 2026.

Around 1989/1990 I was getting into the demoscene on the Amiga, originally thanks to demo group cracktro productions used on pirated games I got from friends. These cracktros had great music in them, which I found out were called modules. I got other full demo productions from PD libraries and was hooked - especially the music disks from Crusaders with the amazing music of Dr.Awesome!

Tracked music (modules) in the Amiga era were mod files, and consisted of multiple patterns with 64 rows, each with up to 4 channels (2 left and 2 right). You used the keyboard to enter the notes in the order you wanted them played in each channel. Notes were actually small samples of 8-bit audio - the sample size and frequency was deliberately restricted to make the module file sizes small. There were many effects you could do to those notes as they were played too.

It was easy to learn, and the small sample sizes meant you could work off floppy disks. Indeed Soundtracker disks were labelled ST-00, ST-01, etc. 

Tracked modules were heavily used on the Amiga - in games and demos. there is still a strong tracked music scene today. 

The original software made for this was called Ultimate Soundtracker. I never could find a boxed commercial version of this software sadly. I got the software from archive.org to try it out.

There was also the more popular Protracker. I used this software extensively myself when composing the music I ultimately used for the demo group The Experience in the late 1990's. 

There were also many copycat commercial tracker software releases though, based on the soundtracker/protracker concept. One of these was Audio Sculpture. The interface is very similar - if it ain't broke, why fix it right?

 

It has two RCA inputs one the back to connect RCA audio leads for left and right channel audio capturing.

For this testing, I used my Sony digital audio player to output audio to the DSS8 sound sampler using a phono to RCA audio cable.

The DSS8 sits nicely next to the MIDI port expansion I have in the serial port next to it on the Amiga 500!

Having loaded on the DSS8 sound sampling software, I could get to work trying it out:

Just go prove this Amiga 500 is a basic 68000 1.3 model, the DSS8 software has a section to advise the system specifications:

This is important to understand since the Amiga can only sample in so much data before it runs out of memory to store it. This also applies to playing module files - the smaller they were the better.

The limitations encouraged creativity to make the most of limited sample sizes. For games, the modules needed to use small memory sizes to leave enough space on disk and in memory for the game itself! Amigas of this era with generally 512k or 1MB maximum memory. Disks stored 880 kilobytes.

There is a good reason tracked music had strict sample size limits - you could only grab a few seconds for each sample. 

The manual is very helpful and shows me how to assign a new sample, and get to work recording it:

There are plenty of customisations you can do in DSS8 software for the sample you are about to capture - levels right and left, monitoring feature to allow you to adjust the settings and sampling rate too:

The screen freezes on purpose when the sound is being captured.

When the capture is done, it prompts for a name for the sample.

Having the sample now on the Amiga, I can modify the sample to my needs. In this case, I wanted a specific section - not the whole thing. The sample editor in DSS8 makes it easy to adjust this.

Having edited it, I saved the sample with a suitable name - this section came from a LoFi song, which suits the lower sampling rate of the Amiga well!

You can see the samples in memory displayed, and you can export them to an IFF audio file on your hard disk.

You can also playback the samples in memory, with many editing functions available too:

For those who played Turrican 1,2 or 3, you would be familiar with the very awesome music for those games, written by Chris Huelsbeck.

He chose to create his own TFMX music format, and made his own TFMX Workstation music software to write the songs with! Chris released this software commercially too, although it was in German language only (to my knowledge).  I did manage to secure a boxed copy of TFMX workstation this year!

With the help of Google translate, I can read the German language manual and get the software installed on the Amiga 500 A590 hard disk. It also has a joystick port dongle that needs to be present for the software to work.

It is a bit of mucking around to get it to launch. It needs to be launched as a shell script, as the original software disk is bootable into a shell environment with function keys to launch various versions of the workstation software. It wasn't really intended to run from hard disk.

That said, I got it working eventually on the A590. DOpus was my friend to copy all the files from all the disks and I customised the startup-sequence from the floppy disk to work on a hard disk! :-)

The software included a number of Chris Huelsbeck classic TFMX tunes to get you started.

As an aside at this point, I was adding these music software I loaded onto the A500 to the dock included with the Old Blue Workbench. However, the icons took up too much space on the desktop. I found a solution by using just the names instead of the icons, and having multiple docks.

This is much better now:

Interestingly enough, one of the more well known music programs I never used until this year - Music-X. I read all about in in Amiga Format magazines back when it was released, but like a lot of software, I couldn't afford it! Now in 2026 I have it though! It says version 1.1 on the box, but it had the 2.0 disks also (I guess the previous owner got an upgrade disk package?) so I used them.

Music-X was considered one the best music editors on the Amiga on its release, with a lot of functionality for MIDI and song creation. It supports more audio channels than tracked music too.

It can operate as a MIDI sequencer, just like Sequencer One Plus, Bars N Pipes or Sonix.

Samples were more flexible too than trackers normally allow. You did need plenty of memory though!

Like the other music software, it can playback internal audio songs created in Music X with samples, or MIDI output.

I definitely need to read the manual to learn how to use this software - it looks quite involved!

Some other software I never heard of for the Amiga included SIDMON, which allows creation of SID style music - note I stress it is not SID music:

The manual is a tiny pamphlet which contains minimal information - so I wasn't able to get far with it yet. It has the usual pattern song editing method of trackers, with notes, instruments and steps

Another new music software I didn't know about was Drum Studio. Released in a small package with minimal documentation, I wasn't expecting much.

I fired up the example songs to see what it could do. It has a limited set of drum instruments and combination effects to work with, but looks like some small fun if you just want to dabble with creating drum loops for your creations. 

I also got another music program called "The Music Studio" - this was released on Mac also. It shows, as all the information in it is for the Mac release! It supposedly works with MIDI also, with some editing features. Unfortunately the disk didn't work - looking at the state of the label on the disk (which should be white), I was not surprised.

I came across this "The MIDI Music Rave Recording Studio" music package for the Amiga recently, so I picked it up.

As expected, it works well with MIDI equipment connected to the Amiga, with traditional music score editing features like Sonix and Deluxe Music 2. It has a built in Sampler as well.

You can also use a grid view rather than traditional musical score view to see the keyboard inputs from MIDI in real time.