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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.

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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).

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