‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music • Hacker News Board

Re: ‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

#51

Post by rasz » Wed, May 04, 2022, 3:19 AM UTC

timbit42 wrote: post #48

rasz wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple IIGS had Ensoniq ES5503 build in, pretty much half of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq_Mirage

Ensoniq was founded by Robert Yannes, the creator of the SID, and Al Charpentier, one of the designers of the VIC-II, and Bruce Crockett, whose history I do not know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensoniq

Bruce was logistics.

InfoWorld - Apr 26, 1982 - Page 18: "Bruce Crockett is Commodore's vice-president of systems manufacturing and the man who keeps the Santa Ciara assembly plant running smoothly."

Before that "Liquid Gold: The Story Of Liquid Crystal Displays And The Creation Of An Industry" page 134 "he was a former operations manager for LEDs at Fairchild"

Apparently Tramiel had a thing for not keeping verbal agreements (suppliers being huge example). Whole C64 team was promised bonuses after release, instead they got "be glad you have a job" pep talk and the smart ones left.

Re: ‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

#52

Post by ahonhn » Wed, May 04, 2022, 5:10 AM UTC

mastazi wrote: post #10

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…

Samplers were cheap? I remember the few I might have been able to acquire from the one or two local shops that had Amiga stuff being at least a hundred bucks - a comparative fortune back when I was on $5 a week pocket money.

Re: ‘It was the poor man’s studio’: how Amiga computers reprogrammed modern music

#53

Post by mastazi » Sun, May 08, 2022, 12:13 AM UTC

ahonhn wrote: post #52

mastazi wrote: post #10

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…

Samplers were cheap? I remember the few I might have been able to acquire from the one or two local shops that had Amiga stuff being at least a hundred bucks - a comparative fortune back when I was on $5 a week pocket money.

Some models were cheaper than that. As an example you can see here[1] this particular model was 30 pounds in 1992, which is equivalent to about 50 dollars[2].

Depending on the time or place they may have been a bit more expensive so it makes sense that in your case you had to spend $100... but let's not forget that a stand-alone sampler was at least 10 times more expensive, so the Amiga was still a way cheaper option than e.g. an Atari ST + MIDI-connected stand-alone sampler.

Also we have to consider that there were sample libraries distributed on floppy - so with an Amiga you could still have "cool sounds" even without a sampler interface - the main point being that audio playback on Amiga was higher quality than most competitors.

[1] https://youtu.be/i9MXYZh1jcs?t=184

[2] https://fxtop.com/en/historical-exchange-rates.php?YA=1&C1=G...