Conserving an Ancient Art of Music: Making SID Tunes Editable

Abstract

This paper describes our approach for editing PSID files. PSID is a sound format that allows the original Commodore 64 synthesizer music to be played on modern computers and thus conserves a music subculture of the eighties. So far, editing PSID files required working directly with Commodore 64 machine language. The paper gives a small overview of sound synthesis with the Commodore 64, argues why this topic is still interesting for both musicians and computer scientists, and describes our editing approach.