[HN Gopher] When hits were stored on floppy disk and created wit...
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       When hits were stored on floppy disk and created with an Atari ST
       (2020)
        
       Author : assttoasstmgr
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2022-05-01 07:40 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.coolsmartphone.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.coolsmartphone.com)
        
       | layer8 wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | quickthrower2 wrote:
         | Kudos for them calling a track "Zeroes and ones" back in 1993.
         | Wonder how many non-geek people knew about zeros and ones then!
        
           | tzs wrote:
           | I've wondered a similar than 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.
        
       | classichasclass wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | karmakaze wrote:
       | > 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.
        
       | jameshart wrote:
       | 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...
        
         | Rodeoclash wrote:
         | 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 :)
        
       | quickthrower2 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | huachimingo wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | nonrandomstring wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | primitiveape wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | mattbee wrote:
       | 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
        
         | bitwize wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | daneel_w wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | FabHK wrote:
       | Maybe interesting for nostalgia:
       | 
       | There is an Atari ST emulator for the Mac,
       | http://hatari.tuxfamily.org or                 brew install
       | hatari
        
         | johnvaluk wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | aasasd wrote:
       | 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.)
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-01 23:00 UTC)