Stone Oakvalley's Authentic SID Collection

Stone Oakvalley's Authentic SID Collection is a project to convert every Commodore 64 song of the High Voltage Sid Collection into MP3 format (145449 of them!) using the actual machine rather than PC emulators.  The sound difference between the analog chip and digital emulation is startling- the analog being much warmer, deep and possessing various natural inconsistencies. Each song was recorded from the three different versions of the Sid chip that was used in the Commodore 64. This sometimes results in diverse playings of the same composition as the three chips process information differently.

I have been sifting through the HVSC for a couple years, converting choice bits to MP3, so it is nice to have this massive library online where I can grab the authentic sounding version. Here are a few of the best ones I found recently:

Trygve Gundersen - Eat Maniac
ZZap 69 - Green Tomato
Kjell Nordbo - Differ
Tim Follin - Bionic Commando

Comments

[Joshua]

Theres a PCI card some people make with real SID chips pulled from old machines so you can use SID synth sounds for other applications:
http://www.hardsid.com/

[bcolflesh]

C64 will never die! Galway and Hubbard need a real world music shrine dedicated to them.

[K]

You know, I'm of two minds here. On the one hand the guy has a point, if you look at the chip architecture it's a digitally controlled analog synth so emulating the results would not nearly match using the original hardware. OTOH, the bot he built to do the job looks like R2D2 after a fiery car wreck, and when you factor in the boy scout uniform and the FAQ answers you get a heaping mess of wing nuttery.

I'm amazed you have the patience to sort through all this stuff, Fats. I'm guessing you were a C64 head? Me, I went with the motorola 6809/Coco. 16 bit registers! But the sound was just a single bit driving the audio output directly. Now that's hard core digital. Hell, I just found the thing in a closet last week, it's sitting in an Avon box under my desk. Do I dare clean it up and plug it in?

[fatty jubbo]

I do appreciate the wing nuttery of it all and his R2D2 car wreck.

yea, I was a c64 head, so there is a bit of nostalgia there.
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/07/my_commodore_64.html
but I also like the limitations of the music made with the chip and how people worked around it. most of the SID music is pretty generic with unbearable smooth jazz melodies and wah-filtered basslines, but there are some gems...mostly early stuff that worked off of classical and prog and later 98-> stuff that really milks the sound from the chip. Lately I have been plundering the NES music archives- there's something about the flat tone of the system that I love...and there's no nostalgia there as I never was much into video games or nintendo.

I remember the CoCo. I remember it being quite the piece of shit, but through some wiki reading lately...i don't know shit about electronics...it seems it was quite a powerful little 8bit machine but was designed very poorly and wasn't able to make use of what it had.

I'm a bit fascinated by Coleco's Adam computer...what a trainwreck!

[K.]

Hmmm... after reading the link, I understand now.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the reason we gave out all those extender numbers was to distract corporate security from our own use of the system. If you found a code, and used it first, it's pretty obvious who the perp is. If you give it to all your fiends across the good ole USA, then the situation is murky indeed. Sorry you got capped; but we all did in one way or another. Ahh, the stories I could tell...

Here's a fragment. A good friend gets busted, and they drag him down to the station house. He's spent the night in the woods (as kids do) and they've already been to his house. So he's at the station, and he walks past the evidence room, and he see's a pile of stuff. Guns, knives, nunchucks, etc confiscated from other bad guys. And there, in the middle of it all, is _his_ C64! How awesome is that? Then, they're puzzled. No one knows how to operate the C64. How do we prove this kid was leet? Just how _do_ you commit a crime with a computer? Pretty murky stuff for your average cop circa 1984.

The Commode 64 callin' the Coco a piece of shit? Well, your pots are talking to your kettles, Fats (grin). I'll admit, that sound chip was the primary appeal of the C64. Not for making music, but for blowing box tones. Blue, silver or red, take yer pick.

[toober]

SIDs were fun, but they were inconsistent as you say. Not only could the various revisions of the chip sound different, but even chips made from the same lot - even the same wafer - could be different. In the mid-80s all the synth makers were looking at the SID, hoping the engineers could get consistency so they could use them instead of the various chips from CEM. It didn't happen.

Oh, C64 is shit. And Coco, too. Real computers have wheels.