When hits were stored on floppy disk and created with an Atari ST (2020) | Hacker News Reader

When hits were stored on floppy disk and created with an Atari ST (2020)

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This is what I remember from those times: if you had external gear (synth, sampler etc.) then the Atari was your best bet because of the built-in MIDI ports[1] and consequently having a good ecosystem in terms of MIDI sequencers. (Cubase, for example, was available for ST)[2].

If you didn't have external gear, then you would go for Amiga (maybe using a cheap Amiga sampler interface[3], and a music tracker[4] as the software) due to the fact that Amiga had better onboard audio, courtesy of Paula[5]. (IIRC, it wasn't until the Falcon that Atari caught up with Amiga in terms of onboard audio).

[1] https://info-coach.fr/atari/hardware/interfaces.php

[2] https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/mirror/tamw/cubase.htm

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker

[5] http://theamigamuseum.com/the-hardware/the-ocs-chipset/paula...

The STe came pretty close with DMA stereo audio playback, though only at 4 sample rates so software resampling and mixing was still required. I did a lot of my own tracking on an 8Mhz 1040STe then later a 16Mhz MegaSTe.

At 16mhz I could do 25Khz playback with full software mixing, or with the 50Khz playback mode the playback routine would "cheat" by just alternating the samples for the two channels per speaker which used less CPU but produced a high frequency squeal that was easily filtered by turning down the treble on your stereo :)

Nice! Yes, I remember the 50Khz mode! For the high frequency noise, there is actually an easy fix (requires a little bit of soldering), if you still have your STe you may be interested: https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/STEDACFIX/index.htm

Just last week I came across this gem about Steve Porcaro about MIDI and Synths.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUNqZ9noSLM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCurJJoSrS4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFxhm9Geg3k

I still love the story of White Town who made Your Woman in 1997:

https://www.wired.com/1997/06/white-town/

Both the single and my album were made with an old Tascam 688 multitrack tape recorder, an Atari ST, and a free sequencer disc I got from the front of a computer magazine because I couldn't afford a "proper" sequencer.

It's a great interview from 1997.

Sent to a radio station and was #1 in 4 weeks. Still a banger:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lVL-zZnD3VU

British electronic musicians and the Atari ST went together like James Bond and the Walther PPK. Like Lisp programmers and Emacs. You get the idea.

To name two of my favorites: The KLF actually special-thanked Atari in the liner notes of The White Room. Imogen Heap's first computer was an Atari ST she got when she was 12, and she immediately began making music on it.

Also Jesus Jones’ album Perverse from 1993 (five years before Fatboy Slim’s release), which I highly recommend: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_(album)

> Perverse [alledgedly] "enjoys the historical distinction of being the first album recorded entirely (except for Edwards' vocals) on computer." The band recorded the entire album onto floppy disks in Edwards' house, which were then used on his computer to turn the music into "zeroes and ones". […] Although the band were ridiculed at the time for the recording process, it later became an influential technique.

Kudos for them calling a track "Zeroes and ones" back in 1993. Wonder how many non-geek people knew about zeros and ones then!

I've wondered a similar thing about the song "Silicone on Sapphire" [1] from The Clash's album "Sandinista!" from late 1980. That song is a dub version of the music from an earlier song on that album, "Washington Bullets", but with the lyrics replaced by a couple voices on the left and right just speaking mostly computer geek phrases back and forth.

[1] Yes, "Silicon on Sapphire" would have made more sense but they used "Silicone" in the title.

There was a pop hit a decade before that, in 1984 ex Yugoslavia - "your computer's program". It was a mainstream song, not for geeks.

80-ties were the time when computers were very present in mainstream tv and newspapers as a fascintaing, hyped new thing. There were lots of educational content explaining in basic terms what computers are. It seemed that everyone (including grandparents) knew they were digital, and most probably that zeroes and ones were involved.

https://youtu.be/pldDuqnPP1s

Back then we still had fairly 'proper' IT classes at schools, at least here on the UK, so quite a few non-geek (certainly, as I saw myself at that age) kids would know at least roughly what binary was.

Nowadays, I suspect less so.

Obligatory Kraftwerk "Computer World" plug.

See https://consequence.net/2021/05/kraftwerk-computer-world-40-...

In the 90s I spent a lot of time with Cubase on my 1040STFM alongside other MIDI sequencers on the Amiga. I found both Cubase v2.xx and v3.10 (which I think was the last Atari version Steinberg released) to be somewhat clumsy and slow to work with due to plenty of editing operations, even some basic such, having to be performed in roundabout ways, and because of Cubase being sluggish UI-wise. The sluggishness was in some part owed to the ST/STF/STFM being lesser hardware on the graphics side. The STe and of course the Mega offered a better experience. Both v2 and v3 also suffered from the problem that, while they did run on an Atari with 1 MB of RAM, they every so often crashed from memory leaks/shortage. RAM expansions for the Atari 520/1040 were unfortunately a complicated topic compared to the cheap and ubiquitous peripheral they were for the Amigas. In contrast, all the MIDI sequencers I used on the Amiga were even on just 1 MB of available RAM fast, smooth and efficient tools to work with. Though none of them had the... how to put it... last pinch of "fancy features" that Cubase offered. Nor did the Amigas have a built-in MIDI interface, but such cost only $30 - or $10 in components if you were handy enough to build your own.

This triggered a long lost memory of seeing an interview with Norman Cook in the pre-Fatboy days in an Atari ST magazine. The internet archive knows all, so here he is, geeking out about midi ports with Zero magazine in 1991:

https://archive.org/details/zero-magazine-07/page/n95/mode/2...

Wow, Zero. That's a trip down memory lane.

I spent a large chunk of my formative early teenage years buying Zero and other magazines like it for the cover disks (they were published even all the way down in New Zealand).

Thanks for the article, I'll just read through the magazine until I get to it :)

I did all my sequencing on a ST Mega 4 for years using that version of Cubase that everyone had back in the bof-bof-bof rave music days. The reason techno musicians loved it, and stuck with Ataris WAY past their natural life, was the MIDI timing. The UART on the ST was clocked absolutely rock solid. Remember this was before DAWs and so most of the gear was external - synthesisers and samplers - so you needed really fine real-time accuracy. Nothing else beat the Atari ST.

It took me a while to realize why my PC-based MIDI setup never "felt" right. It wasn't until I replaced it with an Akai MPC-60 style hardware sequencer that my MIDI compositions finally had that "thing" - idiosyncratic timing that felt good and made you bop along to the beat.

Missed the Atari age entirely.

Yep, there is a reason people drop thousand dollar to $5,000 hardware sequencer PCIe cards, like the RME RayDat, RME AES, Focusrite RedNet, Marian, or Avid, in to their computers.

Those are primarily audio interfaces.

The sequencer on an MPC-60, or a PC based MOTU MTP deals with traditional MIDI (5-pin DIN).

You're right, I was thinking one thing and typing another thing. Weird how that works some days.

RME's MIDI timing is solid though.

Very happy RayDat user here, only wish I'd sprung for it a decade ago.

The cause for your setup not being able to keep an accurate pace was likely something else. MIDI operates at only 31 kilobaud and even a lowly PC of the 90s had more than enough timing accuracy to handle that precisely and without delay. But certain software is just arguably worse than other.

Absolutely, the bane of PC (Mac slightly less so) sequencers of that era was kernel scheduling. With an OS like Windows you had layers of unpredictable buffer synchronisation. It wasn't until AV optimised RT kernels came of age after 2010 that PC sequencing offered satisfactory results - by which time almost all of the generative signal code is internal anyway (as plugins, VSTs etc).

My copy of Tangerine Dream's Optical Race proudly says in the liner notes it was done on an Atari ST. Bet Tramiel didn't pay a penny for that kind of product placement, either.

TD were involved in the design of Cubase. Many versions later Edgar Froese used to grumble that it was outrageous they were expected to pay for a copy instead of getting an endorsement comp.

As I remember, the reason people kept using Atari and not PCs for music is the sound capability and reliable clock timing.

Reminds me of microcomputer programmer back on the Acorn Electron, writing machine code that relied on the 1Mhz clock speed for timing - so you would order the instructions so that things happened at the right time - was fun.

Now you can make music with clones of trackers ported to modern platforms:

http://schismtracker.org/

https://milkytracker.org/

The main problem is finding samples.

And https://16-bits.org/ft2.php

You can extract the samples from any existing tracker music file, https://modarchive.org/ is a good place to start.

Here's also a demonstration of using a sampler and a tracker with an Amiga, all from around 1990: https://youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs

“Aaaand we're out of memory.”

(There's also the humor of sampling Coldcut, who themselves were wizards of audiovisual sampling, at least for their time.)

Maybe interesting for nostalgia:

There is an Atari ST emulator for the Mac, http://hatari.tuxfamily.org or

  brew install hatari

Hatari is also available on Linux and includes a Falcon emulator for those of us who lusted after one but were never able to purchase it.

It's for a lot of platforms, not just the Mac.

My misspent teenage years right there. I still have a few functioning Atari ST microcomputers, with Cubase, sat on the shelf, though now they are more curiosity than audio workhorse.

I have a musician friend who still has an Atari ST in my studio, though he also has a C64 for the SID chip, so make of that what you will.

Today I use a Cintiq, a G13 and a USB "keyboard" to give me twistable knobs, and a little ACID plugin and an Ableton plugin I wrote that lets me paint my notes. Final masters are done in Audition.

> Fatboy Slim – When hits were stored on a floppy disk and created with an Atari ST

Cool. I remember the ongoing, excruciating wait for the Amiga Lorraine to be consumer ready. It was supposed to have MIDI, but as fortune would have it, got dropped and was added to the Atari ST that became the musicians choice.

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