God created Atari with MIDI and saw it was good !!!!
In the beginning there was nothing and the first day I
started to work with my first Atari 1040 stf and my Kawai K4.
I had many years of experience working with midi on the Atari
st before I finally got one of my own. I used Cubase 1.5,
a version with a lot of bugs. The second 'day' I used the
improved version 2.0, the version I'm still working with.
In those days it was very simple : I started with my cubase 2.0
DD floppy and saved the arrangements on a separate floppy.
This was the way it was done for many years.
The third 'day' I bought my first Atari harddisc (60 MB) with
an Atari Mega 4. This changed my way of working with soft and
hardware radically.
At the end of this 'day' I saw it was good : I had a mega ste
(4MB RAM & 500MB harddisc) special prepared for printer jobs
and my mega 4 prepared for midi and sample jobs. I rebuilt
my hard disc because 60MB was not big enough to work with
samples.
The fourth 'day' I bought a second-hand 2 Giga SCSI harddisc
and a SCSI link built in and all kind of connectors placed
for extern SCSI stuff. In that time I wanted the S2000 SCSI
connected to my atari for fast transfer of samples.
This process could be possible with 'ZERO X', a program from
Soundpool. Later I found out that it was only possible with
the Atari Falcon. The Soundpool guys don't say it clear in
their text files, but it seems that you only can connect
with special Falcon DMA-SCSI and only connect the S2000.
On the fifth 'day' I found out that for transferring samples
from sampler to the computer, it's better to use midi because
sometimes transferring via SCSI will give bugs.
So I developed a way to work with my possibilities and,
even it's very time-consuming, the quality is superb.
I still had my Atari 16 bit soundcard. This romcard (Replay 16),
connected to the rom connector of the Atari, I now use to edit
my samples. Because it's 2 times oversampling you almost here
the sample as it is with no audio correction, therefore I also
use the card to select the good samples. After filtering noise
in Wavclean on the pc I always check the sample on this card
to find out if it is perfect without any noise or other
disturbing sounds.
On the sixth 'day' I fixed it into soundsets that I save on
Akai formatted HD floppy's on my mega 4 (with HD floppy drive).
Therefore I use the Atari AkaiSex program of Jules Vleugels
and a HD auto folder program : HD_FDC.prg (see AkaiSex manual)
to recognize the HD floppy drive in this program.
Don't try to do other things than where I use it for.
(I wrote the guy because I found many bugs. For example,
you can't open samples from Akai-disc without getting clicks.
He is not willing to repair them because he stopped with atari).
Only write .AIF samples on the Akai formatted floppy's and load
them in the Akai.
I make the programs (soundsets) with the Akai sampler and save
them on Akai disc's, with the samples. Later on I'll use a
harddisc for this but still make a backup on floppy.
On the seventh 'day' I'll rest, listening to my recordings,
and hearing that the sound is very good !!!
For further information about Atari software and where to
download AKAISEX & HD_FDC.prg, you can visit my Atari Music site >>> link to mnx Atari Music site.
The most of my self-made samples are Digital to Digital sampled
with a digital output on my CD player and digital in on my
sampler expansion board. For more info see DIG_DIG