Welcome to the AMPLE home page.
© Robin Terry 2002
Site last modified 12 February 2003
This site is under construction
A couple of years later, Hybrid overcame the memory limitations by introducing AMPLE Nucleus to support the other hardware that by then was appearing; the Music 2000 MIDI interface and the Music 4000 keyboard. The Music 500 in the meantime was rebranded as the Music 5000 and was still available. Many improvements were introduced with AMPLE Nucleus which added to the flexibility and power of the AMPLE language. Thriving libraries of AMPLE compositions were maintained, and a user group (AMPLINEX) was established.
RISC OS AMPLE is also able to export MIDI files, so your AMPLE compositions can be enjoyed by PC users too!
The textual notation used by AMPLE strips music down to its basic level of pitches, durations and counterpoint. This helps to avoid the increasingly complicated methods that conventional music notation uses to achieve its ends, particularly in the notation of irrational rhythms. This makes AMPLE notation easy to learn compared to conventional notation, and fast for the computer to interpret and perform.
AMPLE notation also makes it simple to express music that would be very complex or impossible to express using conventional notation, particularly contemporary music.
However, the main advantage of AMPLE notation comes from the fact that it has all the flexibility of a programming language to perform calculations and make decisions on the fly, or in response to some external stimulus such as a keypress or mouseclick. This means that music that contains some element of randomness, or that can be altered during performance, is straightforward to produce on AMPLE. Most sequencer programs are not flexible enough to do this sort of thing. AMPLE is powerful enough to perform any MIDI-based music that any MIDI sequencer can perform, plus it can do things that no sequencer can do.
The RISC OS AMPLE application is supplied as a Spark archive, so you will need SparkPlug to unpack it. SparkPlug is freely available from many RISC OS websites, or (if you are a curious PC user) you can use PKUnzip to unpack it.
This application will run on any RISC OS machine equipped with RISC OS 3.10 or later, and requires 2Mb or more to run. You will also need the Toolbox modules, available from the RISC OS Ltd website if you are running RISC OS 3.50 or earlier.
I have recently tried RISC OS AMPLE with ESP's MIDI Synth Plus, and it works fine. This means you don't have to buy a MIDI podule and synthesiser to use RISC OS AMPLE.
I have developed and tested RISC OS AMPLE on RISC OS versions 3.70 and 4.00, but it should work on other versions.
RISC OS AMPLE is freeware. You are permitted to distribute the software to any third party, as long as the following conditions are satisfied:
Various programs are supplied in the Programs directory for you to try. The Testxx programs were used by me to test features, and you are welcome to look at them. However, they may be removed in future distributions if I need the space.
The two pieces in the Terry directory are two pieces of mine, written and performed many years ago by real people on real instruments, and re-implemented in AMPLE by me as an exercise.
I have tested the software extensively, but I cannot be held responsible for anything that might happen while you are using the software. You use it at your own risk, I'm afraid.
This program will convert old BBC Micro AMPLE program files back to text, so that it is possible to manually adapt them to run under RISC OS AMPLE. The converter is quite primitive at this stage, and does not modify the file in any way.
The same conditions of distribution apply to this program as to RISC OS AMPLE.
Please be aware of copyright issues should you decide to convert someone else's BBC AMPLE file to text so that you can modify it.
Archie is a RISC OS emulator for Windows.
AMPLE 0.25 will run under Archie 0.9 with a minor modification to the !Run file within the AMPLE application. Full information on this modification is available in the AMPLE 0.25 !Help file.
I have produced an ADF file (an ADFS disk image for use under Archie) containing AMPLE 0.25 ready set up to work. You must be running RISC OS 3.11 under Archie for this to work.
A new section on the website where I will put freeware RISC OS 4 screensavers.
You can contact the author, Robin Terry, by e-mail by clicking here.
I would be very interested to receive your comments and suggestions for improvements. If anyone produces some compositions using RISC OS AMPLE, then I may consider distributing them with the application, provided that there are no copyright problems.