Atari ST

The dancecrave studio - instruments used for music production

the studio -> atari st

The Atari STs were a central and very stable part of the dancecrave studio for a very long time, providing the sequencing and sampling for all tracks. They were eventuallly replaced by a PC for functionality, but not really realiability!

This picture shows both of the Atari STs I used for a number of years.

The lower one is a 1040 STE with 4 Meg of RAM - yes 4 is a large amount for an ST and a 170 Meg hard disk - yes I did say Meg.

This unit is running Replay 16 a software sampler which turns the ST into a 4 note 16 bit sampler with one velocity level or one note with 4 velocity levels. (at 36Khz)

Though extremely limited compared with any herdware sampler this combination lasted for a number of years and I believe I got the absolute best out of it. Just listen to B&B for an example of the ST and Replay 16.

The upper unit is a 520 STFM with 2.5 Meg memory and a second floppy drive. This was used for running Cubase for all midi recording and sequencing since 1989 and has only recently been replaced with a PC.

The Atari 1040 ST has been very stable and reliable for a number of years yet finally and painfully this was replaced with a PC. It wasn't that the ST was perfect as it did crash sometimes but for some reason it was always obvious when a crash was going to happen (things started going a little slowly, redraws took a bit longer - maybe a little screen corruption in one corner) and there was plenty of time to save before restarting!

In my experience of the earlier versions of Cubase on the PC also tried to give you time to save before a crash, but this sometimes failed and also there was usually a lot more minutes spent waiting for the damn system to settle down and redraw the screen so you can attempt a save. Usually when there is a PC crash I ended up pressing the reset button - that kind of sums up my PC usage experience in general - is a right pain.

I'm glad I've got everything on a MAC now. (GRIN)

The ST was a 'musical' computer as it was made with MIDI ports built into it and from the beginning there was alot of great music software for it. Steinberg Cubase (midi recording system) and Notator Logic (midi sequencing system) I believe started to become widely used on this platform, subsequently to become the market leaders. Many others were of course available as well.

In a way I miss the ST - it's speed at booting (or rebooting after a crash) and loading software was something I have never seen in a PC based system. I don't however regret upgrading to the lovely new features in Cubase VST :)

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