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

Re:When hits were stored on floppy disk and created with an ... by mastazi on Sunday May 01, 2022 @08:33PM (#31230135)
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...

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Re:When hits were stored on floppy disk and created with an ... by nezgar on Sunday May 01, 2022 @10:04PM (#31230665)
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 :)

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Re:When hits were stored on floppy disk and created with an ... by mastazi on Sunday May 01, 2022 @10:49PM (#31230911)
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
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Re:When hits were stored on floppy disk and created with an ... by jbverschoor on Monday May 02, 2022 @04:14AM (#31232529)
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

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