11–20 of 53 posts
Cheaper than an actual recording studio for sure, but "poor man's" is overstating it a bit. They were expensive machines.
Cheaper than an actual recording studio for sure, but "poor man's" is overstating it a bit. They were expensive machines.
The Atari ST was the real "poor man's" version. Though PC-compatible systems with good soundcards, etc. were even more expensive back then.
I used to make music on the Amiga. There is one aspect that the article doesn't explain too well - what allowed the Amiga to flourish as a music making platform, is that it had onboard audio which was much more capable than most other computers of the time, thanks to Paula, which allowed multi channel, high sample rate audio playback [1] These hardware capabilites in turn allowed the development of the Amiga music so…
> But, if you wanted to sample on the Amiga, you actually needed one external piece of hardware: an audio sampling interface, however these were generally very cheap
I don't know if I still have mine. In french we'd call it a "digitaliseur" (literally "digitalizer"). I do know though that I still have something much rarer: a 5"1/4 external Amiga floppy drive (when sailing the high seas, for the price of 30"1/2 floppies it was cheaper to buy a 5"1/4 drive + 30 5"1/4 floppies). We'd then add a switch on the Amiga to be able to boot from the 5"1/4 as if it was a 3"1/2 and no program would know anything about it (it was working perfectly).
Oh shit there's actually still people who get old Amigas specifically for making jungle. Cool to see an article in a mainstream publication about this. You can legit roll up to a party with two amigas and a mixer and bump an entire jungle set out of them... It's that thick 8-bit bassline and the fact that you're programming the song in a scrolling wall of hexadecimal that makes jungle sound the way it does. The sound…
There’s this great documentary about the history of tracker music by “Ahoy” on YouTube: https://youtu.be/roBkg-iPrbw
I used to make music on the Amiga. There is one aspect that the article doesn't explain too well - what allowed the Amiga to flourish as a music making platform, is that it had onboard audio which was much more capable than most other computers of the time, thanks to Paula, which allowed multi channel, high sample rate audio playback [1] These hardware capabilites in turn allowed the development of the Amiga music so…
Interestingly, an amiga and cheap sampler is how Kanye got his start.
Oh shit there's actually still people who get old Amigas specifically for making jungle. Cool to see an article in a mainstream publication about this. You can legit roll up to a party with two amigas and a mixer and bump an entire jungle set out of them... It's that thick 8-bit bassline and the fact that you're programming the song in a scrolling wall of hexadecimal that makes jungle sound the way it does. The sound…
There was an online event just recently, PT1210 Weekender V : https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-QnGutaUuN_ZUc4GOdEc...
Here's one I remember venetian snares had in his youtube likes like a decade ago
I used to make music on the Amiga. There is one aspect that the article doesn't explain too well - what allowed the Amiga to flourish as a music making platform, is that it had onboard audio which was much more capable than most other computers of the time, thanks to Paula, which allowed multi channel, high sample rate audio playback [1] These hardware capabilites in turn allowed the development of the Amiga music so…
Yup indeed... The Amiga was the better machine but when a guy would come up with a ST and hook its Roland or Moog synth through the MIDI port, we were in awe! Interestingly enough for the ST had no fan, it's been used for a very long time in some recording studio (where they liked silent recording equipment). To my surprise I saw an ST still in use well into the 2000s. > But, if you wanted to sample on the Amiga, you…
High resolution on Amiga was interlaced and required a scan doubler to be tolerable. Reading MSDOS formatted floppies required special software. DTP and other productivity software tended to find their way to the ST first. Atari made a rock bottom price cheap laser printer. The total package price for a 1Mb ST + high res monitor was lower than anything Commodore ever offered, and far lower than anything Apple offered, but still got you an 8mhz 68000, a GUI, MIDI ports, etc.
I always try to say: the competition for the ST was the Mac and a PC, not the Amiga. Different market segment. Yes, on a low-res colour monitor many people purchased the ST as a games machine, but it wasn't great for that, really. It was a cheap productivity machine, "power without the price". More memory and more Mhz per dollar than anything else out at the time. And that's the segment Tramiel was targeting, he was going after the Mac ("computers for the masses, not for the classes."). The "Jackintosh"
For MIDI sequencing, there's no comparison. The breadth of software on the ST was far beyond anything on the Amiga and some giants of the current DAW software market like Cubase and Logic got their start there.
And honestly, while onboard sampled sound generation on the Amiga was better than its competition, that's kind of a dubious distinction when we're talking about grainy low-bitrate 28khz 8 bit audio. Not exactly CD quality. Within a few years it was outdated relative to what you could get on a commodity PC ISA sound card.