Just happened upon this while searching for old sound effects to study. Would probably be particularly helpful to beginners but there's some neat stuff in there regardless.
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Sweden
Amiga music is not 8-bit in any sense it is defined in the article. Sample data bit depth (what the article calls volume settings, I guess) for each channel is 8 bits, with 6-bit independent volume control, giving a much higher granularity than "256 possible volume settings". Also, the SNES does not play back 16-bit samples.
I think most of the confusion comes from mixing up PC sound card terminology with classic computer hardware technology. In the former, "8-bit" typically refers to the bit depth of the arbitrary sample playback DACs, and in the latter, it's just an allusion to the popular idea of how home computers/video games typically sounded back when they were marketed as "8-bit".
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just joshing, interesting stuff and good response bloomlinde
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Youngstown, OH
I never pay attention to technical detail so some of that looks like it's off, but I more dug the bits about techniques used in musical examples from multiple systems. Definitely not an in depth analysis but some fun light reading
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Youngstown, OH
defPREMIUM wrote:
just joshing, interesting stuff and good response bloomlinde
no fck u 2 avi
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada
I don't think the term "8-bit" really refers to the sound at all, in the earliest uses of the term it was being used to talk about the 8-bit microcomputer era and the latches, DACs or PSGs used to generate sound on these early computers. Of course, these PSGs all had unique characteristics and therefor to most experienced chiptune folk it seems like a meaningless term.
TL;DR: "8-bit music" is music from or similar to the 8-bit era and not music that was "8-bits" (which is obviously pretty meaningless).