The Commodore 64 is a widely used machine in terms of audio applications. Its SID chip has been used even as the core of a modern MIDI synthetizer (the SIDstation). But what has never been used yet are its speech synthesis capabilities.

Those capabilities were brought to the user under a BASIC language extension called SAM RECITER. SAM stands for "Software Automatic Mouth" and it's maybe the most robotic voice you can ever image. Sadly, modern music software don't support BASIC...

This samplekit in Kontakt 2 format tries to grab the feeling of the original machine.

Sixty words have been sampled using the voices from five original presets plus a custom one.

Plus, all samples comes in two versions, RAW and CLEAN. This is a feature of the original program; you may like the gritty voice of a oldschool computer or you may need a cleaner voice for your sound design. OR you may want to pan them L-R to achieve a nice stereo effect... It's up to you...

Technical side?...Shall we mention that an original SID 6581 chip has been sampled into a digital recorder, cleaned up through two stages of digital denoising, cut and mapped into a Kontakt 2 program with low-pass filter sensitive to velocity? Shall we mention that a BASIC program has been written on the Commodore 64 to manage all the voices and presets?

This was a big dedicated process designed to best create an authentic and enjoyable retro SID voice sample kit

6 voices,
50+Mbytes of sample data,
60 diverse words.
Now a Commodore 64 can talk in YOUR works!

Presets: "SAM, Extra-terrestrial, Stuffy Guy, Little Robot, Elf, Custom."

Some words: "analog, digital, synthetiser, megabyte, one...sixteen, electro, techno, house, Internet, www, dot, com, chip, commodore, sixtyfour..." (can be combined in sentences)

http://www.prokits.co.uk/productview.asp?productID=276

KONEY