Atari SAP Music Archive

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Overview

The Atari SAP Music archive (ASMA) is a project to create an archive of all the available ATARI XL/XE music. it is the 8bit Atari equivalent of the High Voltage SID Collection. Currently in 2022 the collection has over 6000 tunes including old classics as well as music from recent demos released for the Atari XL/XE machines. ExoticA provides a mirror of this collection as well as an advanced search interface. The official site also contains a search as well as players for various platforms (and other information).

The official website for the archive is https://asma.atari.org were you can search, view play and download all tunes. The tunes archive is managed as Subversion repository svn://asma.scene-pl/asma.

Current Version

Release ASMA 3.x (SVN r1709 - 2022-10-06)

Web Interface and Instructions for use

You can find the interface at the Special:ASMA page.

ExoticA provides an interface to the Atari SAP Music archive which allows searching and browsing by filename, author, year and directory path. It also allows the searching and displaying of relevant information from the SAP Tune Information List which contains further information on the tunes.

Browsing

Use the browse section to navigate through the collection by name, author, year or directory location. After choosing the the initial browse criteria, you can filter the results down further by specifying the starting characters of the name. There is a button to switch on the display of the STIL data.

Searching

By default the search boxes use a boolean search. To make a search enter one or more keywords with an optional prefix of +, - or |. + means the word must appear in the data. - means the word should not appear in the data. If no prefixes are used, the + prefix is assumed so the word must appear in the search results. To match an exact phrase enter the string in quotes. To make this clearer here are some examples

  • apples oranges would match data that contains both the words apples and oranges (in any order)
  • +apples +oranges is equivalent to above.
  • +apples -oranges would match data that contains the word apples but not oranges.
  • |apples |oranges would match data that contains either the word apples or the word oranges.
  • "apples and oranges" would match data that contains the phrase apples and oranges

You may also use the wildcard * for partial word matching. For example

  • lem* would match any words starting with lem such as lemons or lemmings.

Note that in boolean mode the wildcard only works appended to a word. You can not use it at the start of a word.

The boolean search can only search on words of 3 characters or more in length, unless searching for a phrase where it can match against phrases containing shorter words (so long as one word is more than 3 characters).

Some of the input fields also have a check box next to them. This enables exact mode. In this mode, the search doesn't recognise the entered text as separate keywords but one entire string (similar to that of the boolean phrase mode). This is useful to match against exact module names especially if they contain non alphanumeric characters which the boolean mode does not handle. The exact search also supports the wildcard * for partial matching. For example searching for format: *tracker* will return any formats with the word 'tracker' in the name, or a search for author Coma* would return any authors which start with 'Coma'. Note that the exact search with wildcards is *much* slower than the default boolean search (although a wildcard can be can be used at the start and end of a string so it can be useful in a few cases).

The quick search box works in the same way, but matches against all the available fields except the STIL field.

The STIL search only supports a boolean search method. The same rules apply as explained above.

Ogg Downloads

The search supports downloading of the music in Ogg Vorbis format as well as mp3. We recommend using the ogg download, but the mp3 download is there should you need it. This feature allows you to play the music on the site with most media players, without having to download a variety of different specialist players. The oggs/mp3s are created on the fly in real-time, and as such are provided for convenience rather than 100% accuracy, however you may well be surprised at how good they sound. To access the ogg/mp3 downloads browse or search for a tune, and a button will be displayed above the results that allows you to show the ogg/mp3 download links.

Thanks to the creators of the following software that is used for the music playback and encoding

  • UADE - Unix Amiga Delitracker Emulator, used for playback of the Amiga formats
  • XMP - For the playback of the multichannel PC formats.
  • Blargg's Audio Libraries - For console music playback
  • ASAP - Another Slight Atari Player, used for the playback of the Atari 8 bit music.
  • Sidplay-residfp - For playback of the Commodore 64 Music.
  • sc68 - For the playback of the sc68 format and SNDH Atari ST music.
  • sexypsf - For the playback of the Playstation music.
  • oggenc - To encode the ogg audio.
  • Lame - To encode the mp3 audio.

Change Log

v1.2
Added Ogg playback.
v1.1
Improved full-text searches to make a boolean "and" for keywords if no operator is specified.
v1.0
First version