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].<p>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).<p>[1] <a href="https://info-coach.fr/atari/hardware/interfaces.php" rel="nofollow">https://info-coach.fr/atari/hardware/interfaces.php</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/mirror/tamw/cubase.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/mirror/tamw/cubase.htm</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs</a><p>[4] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker</a><p>[5] <a href="http://theamigamuseum.com/the-hardware/the-ocs-chipset/paula/" rel="nofollow">http://theamigamuseum.com/the-hardware/the-ocs-chipset/paula...</a>
I still love the story of White Town who made Your Woman in 1997:<p><a href="https://www.wired.com/1997/06/white-town/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/1997/06/white-town/</a><p><i>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.</i><p>It's a great interview from 1997.<p>Sent to a radio station and was #1 in 4 weeks. Still a banger:<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lVL-zZnD3VU" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lVL-zZnD3VU</a>
Also Jesus Jones’ album <i>Perverse</i> from 1993 (five years before Fatboy Slim’s release), which I highly recommend: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_(album)" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_(album)</a><p>> 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.
In the 90s I spent <i>a lot</i> 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.
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:<p><a href="https://archive.org/details/zero-magazine-07/page/n95/mode/2up" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/zero-magazine-07/page/n95/mode/2...</a>
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.
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.
As I remember, the reason people kept using Atari and not PCs for music is the sound capability and reliable clock timing.<p>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.
Now you can make music with clones of trackers ported to modern platforms:<p><a href="http://schismtracker.org/" rel="nofollow">http://schismtracker.org/</a><p><a href="https://milkytracker.org/" rel="nofollow">https://milkytracker.org/</a><p>The main problem is finding samples.
Here's also a demonstration of using a sampler and a tracker with an Amiga, all from around 1990: <a href="https://youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/watch?v=i9MXYZh1jcs</a><p><i>“Aaaand we're out of memory.”</i><p>(There's also the humor of sampling Coldcut, who themselves were wizards of audiovisual sampling, at least for their time.)
Maybe interesting for nostalgia:<p>There is an Atari ST emulator for the Mac, <a href="http://hatari.tuxfamily.org" rel="nofollow">http://hatari.tuxfamily.org</a> or<p><pre><code> brew install hatari</code></pre>
My misspent teenage years right there. I still have a few functioning Atari ST microcomputers, with Cubase, sat on the shelf, though now they are more curiosity than audio workhorse.<p>I have a musician friend who still has an Atari ST in my studio, though he also has a C64 for the SID chip, so make of that what you will.<p>Today I use a Cintiq, a G13 and a USB "keyboard" to give me twistable knobs, and a little ACID plugin and an Ableton plugin I wrote that lets me paint my notes. Final masters are done in Audition.
> Fatboy Slim – When hits were stored on a floppy disk and created with an Atari ST<p>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.