I recently listened to an episode of the
Retro Game Audio podcast all about the SNES sound system. It starts off with the two hosts casually giving general context about the SNES and the 16 bit generation for 15 minutes before they turn to the audio specific subject matter.
Some of the most interesting things are the SNES specific functions and limitations involved with SNES music. The SNES had sampled based audio, but these samples were rarely more than a second and typically were several times shorter. A drum note might be represented by sampling just the initial attack sound while the trailing portion could be represented by fading and looping a shorter sound. There are a lot of hardware specific features they cover, and it's easy to understand as a non-professional.
The last section of the podcast basically just goes through a series of clips from SNES game soundtracks and adding some comments.
There is just a ton of things I learned from this podcast, it was really interesting.
The podcast has an
rss link, but no iTunes feed as far as I can tell.