AUDIO

Suspends or turns sound channels off or on; also used for allowing sound from a cassette player to be passed to a TV used as monitor

Implemented by: ABasiC

With variations: trscolor (pass sound output from cassette to TV)

Also written as:

In the original Amiga BASIC, AUDIO was used along SOUND as a switch for any or all of the Amiga's 4 sound channels at once.

Its first parameter was an integer number between 0 and 15, whose binary representation would be used as a mask for right-to-left, 0 to 3 channel selection: 11, for example, as 1011 in binary, would make the statement act on channels 0, 1 and 3.

The second argument is an integer representing the action itself:

• -1 disables sound on the selected channel(s) and wipes away the current SOUND configured there.
• 0 suspends sound on the selected channel(s). The SOUNDs configured for such channel(s) are kept in memory, and a further call to AUDIO with 1 or any positive integer will make them play again.
• 1 (or any positive integer) resumes SOUND in the selected channel(s).

  ' Disable sound on channel 2
  AUDIO 4, -1
 
  ' Resume sound on channels 2 and 0
  AUDIO 5, 1

In the TRS Color BASIC, AUDIO is used for enabling or disabling sound passthrough from the cassette player used as secondary memory to the television set eventually used for video output. This would presumably allow for analog music and sounds intertwined with software on a tape to be used in games and such, probably before multimedia was a term found in printed material.

• SOUND

• PLAY OFF in ugBASIC

• Amiga ABasiC Reference Manual. Commodore-Amiga, Inc., 1985