Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

0110.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 34 posts

Re: Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

#11

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

coldtea wrote: post #8
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey FooGPT, don't you know that the Commodore and Atari machines were far more influential as platforms for realtime music applications, given that they sold probably two orders of magnitude more than the NeXTcube ever did, and had their own DSP processor for audio generation some years before the NeXTcube was even a concept?

Atari was used a lot by electronic musicians for sequencing because of its built-in MIDI ports. Amiga was popular with the tracking scene. Not influencial in the way the Cube is described here, as the platforms were a class of apps was developed in, more used practical applications.

I'm confused. What influence do you think the Cube had?

Re: Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

#12

Post by [deleted] »

smoldesu wrote: post #10
coldtea wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the Fairlight wasn't exactly for the general market, as it cost as much as a house (and people like Gabriel had custom ones built, and hired assistants to operate them).

Fair, but in truth the NeXTcube was not a layman's product either. With a realtime sound card and proper DAC setup you'd easily run over $10,000, which is "affordable" in the same way later CMI models "only" cost as much as a car. I'm not so much griping at the idea of characterizing it as a media machine, but one of the first? It's not even one of the first digital multitrack recorders.

[deleted]

Re: Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

#13

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #11
coldtea wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Atari was used a lot by electronic musicians for sequencing because of its built-in MIDI ports. Amiga was popular with the tracking scene. Not influencial in the way the Cube is described here, as the platforms were a class of apps was developed in, more used practical applications.

I'm confused. What influence do you think the Cube had?

The development of custom DSP. The Cube had its own powerful DSP processor which could process sound in programmable ways, rather than simply playing an 8-bit sample or two.

It was the direct ancestor of today's VST/AU/AAX/etc synth and FX plugin market.

Re: Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

#14

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #13
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm confused. What influence do you think the Cube had?

The development of custom DSP. The Cube had its own powerful DSP processor which could process sound in programmable ways, rather than simply playing an 8-bit sample or two. It was the direct ancestor of today's VST/AU/AAX/etc synth and FX plugin market.

AFAIR, it was a stock Motorola DSP. The only that was odd about it was that it was mounted on the motherboard. You could (and I did) get access that sort of DSP through daughterboards before the Cube, but NeXT took the step of saying "this ought to be a part of the computer itself".

I really disagree about it as a direct ancestor of the contemporary plugin API. These have always run on the host CPU, not dedicated DSP chips (excluding of course Digidesign's original ProTools model, but that was DSP farm rather than just a chip).

And the sort of DSP that was being done on the Cube DSP was being done before the Cube too.

Re: Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

#15

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

smoldesu wrote: post #10
coldtea wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the Fairlight wasn't exactly for the general market, as it cost as much as a house (and people like Gabriel had custom ones built, and hired assistants to operate them).

Fair, but in truth the NeXTcube was not a layman's product either. With a realtime sound card and proper DAC setup you'd easily run over $10,000, which is "affordable" in the same way later CMI models "only" cost as much as a car. I'm not so much griping at the idea of characterizing it as a media machine, but one of the first? It's not even one of the first digital multitrack recorders.

The Cube was really aimed at the academic research market, and it sort of did ok there as far as sales went. As a research system it had some audio and DSP features and it was up to users to write their own code to do something interesting with them.

The Fairlight was aimed at the high end music market. It did some very specific things and nothing but those very specific things. It was super-useful for music production, but it was - in its high-end way - a closed end user product, not an open development system.

The problem with the Cube - aside from the price - was that the DSP hardware was still quite slow. Although you could develop your own applications they were very limited compared to the commercial synths, samplers, and FX processors that were available commercially.

So it was only really useful for prototyping new concepts for applications, rather than producing finished applications.

That's where Max came from. Initially it was a very minimal sort-of-modular MIDI processor. The IRCAM merged it with their Cube-based synthesis and processing system. Eventually that became Max/MSP, a commercial product with both MIDI and audio generation and processing. (Then video and low-level custom DSP were added, but those are much more recent.)

Re: Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

#16

Post by coldtea »

smoldesu wrote: post #10
coldtea wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the Fairlight wasn't exactly for the general market, as it cost as much as a house (and people like Gabriel had custom ones built, and hired assistants to operate them).

Fair, but in truth the NeXTcube was not a layman's product either. With a realtime sound card and proper DAC setup you'd easily run over $10,000, which is "affordable" in the same way later CMI models "only" cost as much as a car. I'm not so much griping at the idea of characterizing it as a media machine, but one of the first? It's not even one of the first digital multitrack recorders.

>With a realtime sound card and proper DAC setup you'd easily run over $10,000, which is "affordable" in the same way later CMI models "only" cost as much as a car.

Yeah, but at the same time a comparable plain 'business' Mac (without soundcard and DAC cost in the order of $5000). So, $10K is not so far off if you have a regular studio (most regular pro gear had comparable prices and you needed dozens of them, H3000s, compressors, reverbs, and so on) or a music research facilicy, etc.

Re: Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

#17

Post by coldtea »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #14
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The development of custom DSP. The Cube had its own powerful DSP processor which could process sound in programmable ways, rather than simply playing an 8-bit sample or two. It was the direct ancestor of today's VST/AU/AAX/etc synth and FX plugin market.

AFAIR, it was a stock Motorola DSP. The only that was odd about it was that it was mounted on the motherboard. You could (and I did) get access that sort of DSP through daughterboards before the Cube, but NeXT took the step of saying "this ought to be a part of the computer itself". I really disagree about it as a direct ancestor of the contemporary plugin API. These have always run on the host CPU, not dedicated DSP…

>I really disagree about it as a direct ancestor of the contemporary plugin API. These have always run on the host CPU, not dedicated DSP chips (excluding of course Digidesign's original ProTools model, but that was DSP farm rather than just a chip).

That's like saying "computing in the 80s was all about the home computer market, if we exclude the PC". ProTools was the biggest name (and quite close to a monopoly for pros at the time).

Re: Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

#18

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #14
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The development of custom DSP. The Cube had its own powerful DSP processor which could process sound in programmable ways, rather than simply playing an 8-bit sample or two. It was the direct ancestor of today's VST/AU/AAX/etc synth and FX plugin market.

AFAIR, it was a stock Motorola DSP. The only that was odd about it was that it was mounted on the motherboard. You could (and I did) get access that sort of DSP through daughterboards before the Cube, but NeXT took the step of saying "this ought to be a part of the computer itself". I really disagree about it as a direct ancestor of the contemporary plugin API. These have always run on the host CPU, not dedicated DSP…

It was the ancestor in the sense that the DSP features were part of the OS and not a bolted-on add-on with non-standard drivers. And also in the sense that you now had an off-the-shelf machine that could do non-trivial real-time synthesis and processing.

When NeXT was folded back into Apple, the audio classes eventually became (more or less) the AUs in MacOS.

An abstraction layer made it possible to run natively, or on internal DSP, or on external DSP. Aside from Digi, Waves, Universal Audio, TC Electronic, and Focusrite all made external processors that used the AU/VST interface. (UA still do, although recently they - at last - also started offering native versions of some of their plugins.)

Re: Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

#19

Post by spacechild1 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #15
smoldesu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair, but in truth the NeXTcube was not a layman's product either. With a realtime sound card and proper DAC setup you'd easily run over $10,000, which is "affordable" in the same way later CMI models "only" cost as much as a car. I'm not so much griping at the idea of characterizing it as a media machine, but one of the first? It's not even one of the first digital multitrack recorders.

The Cube was really aimed at the academic research market, and it sort of did ok there as far as sales went. As a research system it had some audio and DSP features and it was up to users to write their own code to do something interesting with them. The Fairlight was aimed at the high end music market. It did some very specific things and nothing but those very specific things. It was super-useful for music producti…

> The IRCAM merged it with their Cube-based synthesis and processing system. Eventually that became Max/MSP, a commercial product with both MIDI and audio generation and processing.

Miller Puckette, the original author of Max, left IRCAM and went on to develop Pure Data (Pd) as an open source alternative. Pd introduced realtime audio processing. Max integrated Pd's DSP code and became Max/MSP. MSP stands for 'multi signal processing' or 'Miller S. Puckette'. (Miller himself named Max after computer music pioneer Max Mathews.)

Re: Electronic Music and the NeXTcube – Running Max on the Ircam Musical Workstation

#20

Post by johndoe0815 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #3
joren- wrote: post #2

The NeXTcube is an influential machine in computing history. The NeXTcube, with an additional soundcard, was also one of the first off-the-shelf devices for high-quality, real-time music applications. Here a restored NeXTcube runs an early version of MAX, an environment for interactive music applications.

Hey FooGPT, don't you know that the Commodore and Atari machines were far more influential as platforms for realtime music applications, given that they sold probably two orders of magnitude more than the NeXTcube ever did, and had their own DSP processor for audio generation some years before the NeXTcube was even a concept?

The only Atari machine featuring a DSP (the same Motorola 56001 as in NeXT machines) was the Falcon, which was introduced in 1992 - four years after the introduction of the NeXT system (and one year before NeXT black hardware was discontinued). Less than 20,000 Falcons were produced [1], whereas around 50,000 NeXT machines were built.

AFAIK the only Amiga that would have come with a DSP in a default configuration is the never released A3000+ which used an AT&T DSP3210. Prototypes of the A3000+ existed in 1991.

The major contribution of the original Atari STs to music were the built-in MIDI ports, which made it easy and simple to connect digital synthesizers, keyboards, etc. The music capabilities of a regular ST were rather constrained due to its outdated AY-3-8910/YM2149 sound chip (the SID in a C64 was more capable). Only the STE introduced PCM audio.

I guess someone more knowledgable about Amigas than me can add some facts about its sound capabilities.

[1] https://stcarchiv.de/stc1993/10/interview-atari-bob-gleadow

Post reply on HN