Can the fearsome midi timing of c-lab's creator/notator be now found in contemporary midi-capable software?

[gigasquid]

Hi all,

I'm now in my 70's and my grief at being shafted by the makers of creator/notator still pops up occasionally. I had the most fun and creative time ever with Creator but now perhaps I should just let it go - as I'll have to one day.

I still have a drawer full of my Creator experiments on floppies and though I've searched high and low, nothing seems to be available on the net as a way of easily transferring my Atari stuff to my 4-core PC "super computer" so that I can keep working on my SON and PAT files.

Utilities that once had value in this area have gone the way of the dodo too.

I still have 3 Atari 1040 STFMs sitting in boxes but whether they still function I don't know.

The question I began with: "Can the fearsome midi timing of c-lab's creator/notator be now found in contemporary midi-capable software?" may determine if I spend more time in raking through the Atari ashes, or find a prog that will do the midi thing really well. BTW - I don't read music.

I imagine a few of you have gone down this path - what say you?

Thanks and appreciation.

John

[The Elf]

Truly, is the question of whether the MIDI timing in modern DAWs good or not (by 1980s standards) really not going to make the difference as to whether you leap forward in time or not?

In short, if it really worries you and you have the patience and tenacity to stick with the old kit, then turf out those Ataris and see if they're working!

Else jump in the time machine and try a modern DAW. As long as you have a computer built in the last decade you'll have no trouble with something like Cockos Reaper (free to try) - even if you have to borrow an audio/MIDI interface to do it. Then you can make your own mind up as to whether any concerns about MIDI timing outweigh using a modern DAW.

Personally I never concern myself about MIDI timing at all - haven't for many, many years, in fact. When I render MIDI parts to audio I may shift or quantise the part if it's not as tight as I'd like - but it's really not an issue.

[BJG145]

Bin the floppies and the antique hardware, get a new DAW, and write some new music.

Anything else is just procrastination and displacement activity.

[Exalted Wombat]

Well, see if one of the Ataris will boot up and have a go! Could Creator export MID files? They'll go into any modern sequencer, and I'm sure getting data off an Atari floppy isn't impossible.

But all that time you spent in Creator wasn't about making SON and PAT files, it was about developing musical ideas. Dig those IDEAS out of your head and stop worrying so much about your old "exercise books".

[BJG145]

I'd still say ditch the old ideas and make room for some new ones. Some people spend far too much time trying to rehash old material when they should be getting creative. If these old tunes were never finished there was probably a reason.

[muzines]

Funnily enough I'm throwing out my trusty Atari ST this week - the floppy drive doesn't work on it anymore, and my ST hard drive is dead so no real chance of recovering anything either, so, much as I have a lot of nostalgic memories, it's time for it to go...

The timing was great on Creator, I used it for years before moving through Notator -> Notator Logic (Atari) -> Logic Platinum (PC) -> Logic Pro (Mac PPC) -> Logic Pro (Mac Intel).

It wasn't the Atari in general though - the sequence I used before Creator was a freebie which seemed to be well regarded, but the timing on that was so audibly bad it was unusable - getting Creator was a relief as it was so solid. Also, the timing on additional MIDI ports under Creator was poor, it was only the main Atari (and later Log3) ports that was good.

I've never had noticeable timing problems on any versions through to the current version of Logic. There was an online page where some guy went into the timing and jitter and it makes interesting reading. OSX has had MIDI time stamping built in from the early days, and this is different (and actually better) than emagic's AMT time stamping.

Yes, as we've always had to deal with with MIDI, if you are moving large quantities of data the timing always suffers due to the serial nature of MIDI, so we've always used some techniques to "help" keep MIDI data timing solid. But I've never noticed enough of a problem to even bother with for years, certainly nothing that gets in the way of my music or changes timing in noticeable ways - but also, like many people, I'm using less external MIDI gear these days and it's so easy to print to audio anyway, the necessity to run multiple devices live via MIDI is no longer as necessary as it once was.

If you want to run science tests, then yes you can focus on the few millisecs of jitter an complain about it, but I find in practice it just is not noticeable for me.

Current versions of Logic will still import Notator song files (but not patterns) but if you really want to keep your data, use the Ataru to convert to MIDIfiles, and move those files onto a more modern system (if you are using floppies for this, make sure they are PC-formatted).

As for me, I will be going through a stack of ST floppies to save what I can, and it will be going to be chucked. It really is the end of that era - fond memories, but I'm glad we've moved on somewhat - modern tools are *amazing*.

[muzines]

I'm now in my 70's and my grief at being shafted by the makers of creator/notator still pops up occasionally.

"Shafted"..?

The devs had really pushed Creator/Notator to the limit of what the Atari could do, and they had two real problems - one is that Cubase had demonstrated that the graphical arrange mode was the market-preferred way of doing a software-based sequencer, and two, people were starting to look at hard disk recording and integrating audio into sequencers.

(Note - if you look through the resource files of Creator/Notator 3.x, you will find various unused defunct screens for hard disk recording - they were trying, but the Atari just didn't have enough engine for this).

Given that it was the end of the road for Notator (the devs basically hated it by the time is was getting to the end of it's life) and started again with a clean slate - incorporating many of the unique features of Notator with a new, multiwindow, graphic and object-oriented approach which would lead them into the future, and be cross-platform as well, and be able to incorporate audio.

It was really the end of the road for the Atari ST at this point - Atari just ran out of ability to push the platform significantly further, alas.

I upgraded from Creator to Notator Logic Atari for a very usable fee, and carried that forward for twenty years - i don't consider this being shafted at all - the closest to that was when they were forced to terminate the Windows version, and even then they gave users a free Mac license if they decided to move to the Mac - which I did, and have finally been very happy ever since.

Pretty good support behaviour from a developer over the years, I think...

[Exalted Wombat]

I upgraded from Creator to Notator Logic Atari for a very usable fee, and carried that forward for twenty years - i don't consider this being shafted at all - the closest to that was when they were forced to terminate the Windows version, and even then they gave users a free Mac license if they decided to move to the Mac - which I did, and have finally been very happy ever since.

Yes, that was when I felt people were shafted - moving to Mac-only was a dirty trick. It didn't affect me - my path started on Atari Pro-24 and ended (so far) on PC Cubase, but I felt the pain of some collegues.

Not that Pro-24 and today's Cubase have much in common apart from the maker's name!

There's a lot of guff spoken about timing. I read "Keyboard" magazine in the early days of MIDI and computer sequencers. Some big names were convinced they could hear sloppiness in MIDI timing compared to playing their favourite electronic keyboard directly. Even when it was established that the keyboard scan time was an order of magnitude longer than any MIDI slop. Also compare the strange "beliefs" that some successful engineers share in SOS interviews and (particularly) in Tape Op magazine.

[paul tha other]

i remember a good few years ago i did something similar...my memory is a bit fuzzy about the facts so do quote me on it..the atari st floopys were single sided and double sided..the double sided ones can be read on a pc (windows 95 98,maybe 2000 not sure about the rest)if you get the files maybe you could load up a atari st emulater to bounce out the midi files and load them into a modern daw(providing your new pc has a floppy drive)

in saying that i could be completly wrong

[muzines]

the double sided ones can be read on a pc (windows 95 98,maybe 2000 not sure about the rest)

They can only be read on the PC if they were formatted on the PC first. Disks formatted on the ST have a one-byte difference in the disk format which causes the disks to not be read on the PC - formatting them on the PC first keeps this intact and they can be used on both the ST and PC without problems.

if you get the files maybe you could load up a atari st emulater to bounce out the midi files and load them into a modern daw(providing your new pc has a floppy drive)

For Creator/Notator? No, because they used hardware dongles and so won't work on an ST emulator...

What I'm going to try to do is see if I can read the ST floppies using Gemulator on the PC...

[gigasquid]

Thanks for all your great replies folks. I've learned a fair bit from what you said. I'd like to be able to tell you that with all our humungous techno-skill we should be able create a Creator/Notator capable Atari on a chip - one chip and very little else. A small box for a few dollars. I bet it could be done. But I'm not holding my breath.

In the meantime you've given me a push to try Reaper on a fast PC, which I'm doing now. Its makers have done wonders with Reaper, value-wise, useful, accessible and hugely capable.

John

[Exalted Wombat]

I'd like to be able to tell you that with all our humungous techno-skill we should be able create a Creator/Notator capable Atari on a chip - one chip and very little else.

We probably could, copyright issues permitting. And there's always Steem. But who would want it? We have so much better now. I can (sort of) see the attraction of running original programs on an original Atari. Or of porting favourite games to a modern system. But, nostalgia apart, I don't think we'd find antique productivity software all that productive!

There might be a small market for equipment that reads Atari floppys, and for a program that translates Creator files to something today's sequencers can read. There may even be a "naughty" Creator for Steem. I'm sure there are people in the online Arari community who will do the first part for you, get the data off Atari disks.

[muzines]

There may even be a "naughty" Creator for Steem.

From what I remember, there was one naughty version of Notator, v2.2 or something, but it was very unstable (crashed a lot) and in any case, Notator has always run pretty close to the hardware and doesn't really work on an emulator. In short, it might be possible, but is probably full of frustration trying to get it to work...

[Exalted Wombat]

There may even be a "naughty" Creator for Steem.

From what I remember, there was one naughty version of Notator, v2.2 or something, but it was very unstable (crashed a lot) and in any case, Notator has always run pretty close to the hardware and doesn't really work on an emulator. In short, it might be possible, but is probably full of frustration trying to get it to work...

It would only have to work long enough to open a Notator file and export it as a .MID. Assuming we'd found a way to read the old floppies.

[muzines]

It would only have to work long enough to open a Notator file and export it as a .MID. Assuming we'd found a way to read the old floppies.

Yep, as long as Notator 2 will open Notator 3 files, which I'm not sure it will.

Like I already said - all versions of Logic, Atari/Mac/PC can still open Notator songs and export midifiles - so getting Notator running somehow is not the only way to convert your songs...

[muzines]

Assuming we'd found a way to read the old floppies.

Ok, I'm doing this now.

Download this, and the free driver linked from the page:
http://strecover.codeplex.com

This can read Atari ST formatted floppies in a regular PC floppy drive, and save them in a disk image format suitable for using in an emulator. Then you can simply use one of the available emulators like Steem to access the files and copy them to your PC. Or you can access the disk images with Gemulator Xplorer.

A bit tedious, but it's working for me...

[Tomás Mulcahy]

If you stick with software instruments, the timing is way more awesomer than Atari every (allegedly) was.

Bit of perspective- the timing delay in MIDI gear is around the same as it is if you're sitting a few metres from the drummer.

[muzines]

If you stick with software instruments, the timing is way more awesomer than Atari every (allegedly) was.

Bit of perspective- the timing delay in MIDI gear is around the same as it is if you're sitting a few metres from the drummer.

Yep. And also, no matter how good the sequencer's MIDI timing is, that data goes out on a relatively slow MIDI cable, serially (hence, the more events that need to happen at once, the less likely they will), then get sent to external MIDI devices, which will have their own (different) delays in receiving and processing the MIDI data into an actual sound... it's a wonder anyone *ever* got tight MIDI timing.

You could do it if you knew the technology limitations and could work around those things to your advantage, but the fact that people attach some mythical timing excellence to the ST doesn't really bear out if you actually analyse what's going on. You *could* get tight timing - and you can still get tight timing now. You can also mess it up royally - although we have better tools to deal with that these days too...

Also, MIDI was never as tight as the old CV/gate system could be, but was obviously a lot more flexible in most ways...

[Exalted Wombat]

If you stick with software instruments, the timing is way more awesomer than Atari every (allegedly) was.

Bit of perspective- the timing delay in MIDI gear is around the same as it is if you're sitting a few metres from the drummer.

But that delay is constant, easy to compensate for either physically or in your perception. It's timing drift or jitter that causes problems.

Also, beware of long-standing prejudices that originate from comparing the early days of a new technology with the mature system that preceded it. "PCs have bad MIDI timing". "Digital sounds harsh". "Macs are better for creative stuff" (ducks for cover

[muzines]

Been having "fun" moving my old Atari floppies on the PC, and then over to the Mac. A lot of floppies have read problems

I've got Gemulator running on the PC and Hatari on the Mac. I can confirm the "naughty" version of Notator seems to work under Hatari, at least good enough for file conversions, as I don't think Hatari supports much MIDI I/O. Not sure off hand if it works under Gemulator on the PC but it's something I can check.

Sadly, I have mislaid most of my old song files from the Creator/Notator days as my old Atari HD no longer works at all and I haven't located any other backups in my wanderings.

Bit of a blast from the past looking at a Notator window on the Atari display window - sheesh!

John - how much stuff have you got to convert? If you can get the floppies onto your PC using the methods I outlined above, then I might be able to help from there to convert them into a form you can move forward with, or try and set up an emulator system with the old software you need to do the conversion yourself...

[muzines]

I still find it amazing that the Notator SL 3.2.1 program file is... 49K!

Yes, there are some other resource files and such, but the actual program code is under 50K!

[Tomás Mulcahy]

But that delay is constant, easy to compensate for either physically or in your perception. It's timing drift or jitter that causes problems.

But musicians are jittery too As an aside- it bothers me when laptop musos can't bop to their own beat generating...

Also, beware of long-standing prejudices that originate from comparing the early days of a new technology with the mature system that preceded it. "PCs have bad MIDI timing". "Digital sounds harsh". "Macs are better for creative stuff" (ducks for cover

Ah but gross over-simplifications are the stuff of the tinterwebs! You're no fun.

[Exalted Wombat]

I still find it amazing that the Notator SL 3.2.1 program file is... 49K!

Yes, there are some other resource files and such, but the actual program code is under 50K!

Disgusting bloat! Strip out all that eye candy. What's wrong with a command line anyway?

[David Etheridge]

Hi folks,
fascinating stuff here, particularly for me as I'm still a die hard Atari fan.
Currently my entire studio is boxed up in the garage, as I'm going through a messy divorce and when things are sorted out I'll still be using my hardware setup rather than going all current and softsynthy.
Now why should I do this? Am I an unreconstructed luddite? (Some might say yes! )
I actually enjoy the perversity of using 25 year old technology to create music. You might dismiss this, but what difference is there between that and folks who drive around 'collector's' and 'classic' cars in these days of all electronic cars that do 100mpg, have satNav, USB, onboard TVs and God knows what else? Closer to home, if digital technology is so wonderful (and undoubtedly it is) then why aren't all guitarists playing Line 6 instruments that can emulate anything from a Les Paul to a 12 string to a fretless, without even breaking into a sweat? Likewise, there are still vinyl fans (vinyl sales are booming once again, in a nice homespun way), and there are specialist synth and tape machine repairers who have more work than they can handle. Are they all retro retards, or do they love this technology for what it is?

So I stick with my Atari and Notator for various reasons. The last time it crashed was 1996, it's easy to get around, I use the score edit almost exclusively, and there's only three different edit pages to deal with. Logic is wonderful, but (like all modern programs) it's so full of wonderful side alleys that you can go and play in that it's very easy to get lost there and forget what you were trying to do in the first place.
I rarely use floppies apart from boot up duties and archive stuff; I still use Syquest EZ drives (fast and silent and available for pennies on Ebay), and if anything goes wrong with my tower hard drive system -or indeed anything to do with Atari - a quick call to Barrie at Keychange usually gets this fixed (usual disclaimer). There are other Atari specialists on the Atari forum and stockists on Ebay.
For Desmond's info, you may not realise that Barrie also offers a data recovery service from supposedly dead drives. He could probability recover all your old files and sort out a whizzo new drive for you.
The problems with timing can be overcome in various ways; one in Notator is to add a negative delay value to a track to move it slightly forward in time, so the data is sent minutely before other data (if you see what I mean). Some MIDI modules react less well than others, or a particular patch may have a slow attack, so this kind of time juggling (for want of a better word) solves a lot of problems. Obviously having Log 3 and Unitor can distribute the MIDI stream across six discrete outputs rather than a MIDI traffic jam down one MIDI buss - and when my setup is back up and running, I'm going to slave 2 Ataris together for 192 channels and see how that works. This is not new; from memory, in 1995, SOS interviewed Klaus Schulze who was running FIVE Ataris and 290 MIDI channels, and he loved them.

Then there's the whole question of softsynths. Sure they're delightful, but I have several MIDI modules that aren't available as softsynths. I want those sounds still, and my association with (to give an example) the Kurzweil 1000 series goes back decades. I interviewed Ray Kurzweil for a mag several years ago at which he hinted at the possibility of a software version of the 1000 series (and by implication the K250?) but it's all been silent since then. So I'll stick with my favourites, and use my Atari editors and libraries with them quite happily.

What about audio? I still use 8 track tape, and have done many projects and albums with them quite successfully. This technology still works (just like classic cars and steam locomotives for that matter), and the results can be good. Obviously I don't have the very flexibility that a DAW offers, but then many albums were recorded in the past without that technology, and they're still held up as object lessons to today's engineer's in recordings that may not be up to today's standards technologically, but still have that something about them.
So I record in a different way to DAW users, making use of the very restrictions of the technology and hardware as I go along, and that suits me fine. It's all a matter of personal approach, and as we know, every approach is right if you get the results you want.

Maybe if Atari hadn't been so inept in their handling of business and technology we would have seen an equivalent computer to Mac Pros in existence even now. Remember the very first Macs, which were of a similar spec to Atari STs and didn't have the MIDI ports built in. Then compare those 'stone age' machines to today's computing Starships, and imagine that Atari had done something similar. Some of the independent Atari clones being developed even now (mostly in Europe, as I understand it) show some possibilities.

Anyway, I'll close for now and await reactions from you folks.


Best wishes,

David.

[muzines]

Currently my entire studio is boxed up in the garage, as I'm going through a messy divorce and when things are sorted out I'll still be using my hardware setup rather than going all current and softsynthy.

Sorry to hear that David...

Now why should I do this? Am I an unreconstructed luddite? (Some might say yes! )

Nah, whatever works for you. Most of the really good musicians I know aren't that up to date on tech, they have a system that works for them and they make brilliant music with it - they introduce new things gradually and only when addressing a specific need, or to bring in some new inspiration. Music first, tech second.

I actually enjoy the perversity of using 25 year old technology to create music. You might dismiss this, but what difference is there between that and folks who drive around 'collector's' and 'classic' cars in these days of all electronic cars that do 100mpg, have satNav, USB, onboard TVs and God knows what else? Closer to home, if digital technology is so wonderful (and undoubtedly it is) then why aren't all guitarists playing Line 6 instruments that can emulate anything from a Les Paul to a 12 string to a fretless, without even breaking into a sweat? Likewise, there are still vinyl fans (vinyl sales are booming once again, in a nice homespun way), and there are specialist synth and tape machine repairers who have more work than they can handle. Are they all retro retards, or do they love this technology for what it is?

I quite like revisiting it for nostalgia, but I'm happy I don't have to live there - modern days are better, imo much as the old days give me some happy memories...

For Desmond's info, you may not realise that Barrie also offers a data recovery service from supposedly dead drives. He could probability recover all your old files and sort out a whizzo new drive for you.

I am aware of this, and I have kept my drive on the offchance I may want to do that. But to be honest, I don't really *need* any of that data, it would be more for archival and nostalgia and so the potentially not insignificant cost of data recovery outweighs the value of the data. I had saved a lot of that data off before, and I've got some more back from random floppy backups - the ones I could read. In any case, I'd hoped it was just the power supply that was dead and the drive would work fine - but I tried to power it up with a different power supply in a PC and it was still dead, so drive recovery more likely a harder task than just rehousing the drive into a new enclosure - when you have to start taking apart drive mechanisms themselves and moving the platters to a new drive in a clean room, it's a whole different ballgame.

Then there's the whole question of softsynths. Sure they're delightful, but I have several MIDI modules that aren't available as softsynths. I want those sounds still, and my association with (to give an example) the Kurzweil 1000 series goes back decades. I interviewed Ray Kurzweil for a mag several years ago at which he hinted at the possibility of a software version of the 1000 series (and by implication the K250?) but it's all been silent since then. So I'll stick with my favourites, and use my Atari editors and libraries with them quite happily.

Most of my hardware is gone, replaced by virtuals and I don't really miss them - the virtuals do a plenty good job, offering more resources, and just aren't as sexy to play with. Stuff like the Kurzweils would be fairly easy to bring into the computer as they are fairly basic but decent sounding sample players - they can be multisampled out easily (though not on an Atari

Other things are less easy to do - I have an XV-5080 here that would basically be too much effort to sample it would be pointless, and that's just sampling the presets.

There is no doubt there is value in hardware though - but only really in the older vintage stuff, or the modern cool stuff - that big chunk in the middle, the early digital period, the hardware is mostly worthless and modern software does almost everything substantially better in all regards...

So I record in a different way to DAW users, making use of the very restrictions of the technology and hardware as I go along, and that suits me fine. It's all a matter of personal approach, and as we know, every approach is right if you get the results you want.

Yep, and again if it works for your kind of music, then it's all good. However there are styles of music that you just could not do without access to modern tools. I've done tracks with 80+ tracks of backing vocals on restricted track-count machines, and its so tedious it's unbelievable - great that it was possible *at all*, but there are so much better ways of doing these things today that *if your music needs them* it's silly not to take advantage of some modern tools. But i's all very dependent on what the individuals' needs are.

Maybe if Atari hadn't been so inept in their handling of business and technology we would have seen an equivalent computer to Mac Pros in existence even now. Remember the very first Macs, which were of a similar spec to Atari STs and didn't have the MIDI ports built in. Then compare those 'stone age' machines to today's computing Starships, and imagine that Atari had done something similar. Some of the independent Atari clones being developed even now (mostly in Europe, as I understand it) show some possibilities.

Indeed. For what it's worth, on this Macbook Pro in front of me, I can run a Windows machine emulated in software, and on that software-emulated Windows machine, run a copy of Gemulator, which is software emulating an Atari - I can emulate a 68040 Atari TT with 14MB of ram and a large screen size and it runs approximately 200-300 times faster than a regular Atari ST. That;s under *two levels* of software emulation - basically, anything you do on the virtual Atari happens *instantly* - quite amazing. Calamus SL flies...

Unfortunately, native Mac emulators only run cycle-accurate so while you can run a faster virtual Atari, it's not screamingly fast like Gemulator. However, it is fun to play with, when undergoing a bit of nostalgia.

I have a lot of fondness for the old Atari. However, I *really love* my Macbook Pro, and couldn't be without the things I can do on it...