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I own 4 Mega STe and I am using them almost daily. One of them, the rest is spare parts. Producing music with it. The Atari is my MIDI master clock and central
by Aldipower 1y ago
I own 4 Mega STe and I am using them almost daily. One of them, the rest is spare parts. Producing music with it. The Atari is my MIDI master clock and central piece of MIDI sequencing together with Cubase 3.1 for the Atari. Seriously the MIDI timing is unbeaten until today! The MIDI ports are directly attached to the CIA chip which is again directly connected to the Motorola 68k CPU. Runs absolutely stable even 35 years later. No crashes what so ever and also no distractions by updates or "phone home applications". It just works, distractless! Shame on the "present future".
- vanderZwan 1y ago> Seriously the MIDI timing is unbeaten until today! Is this in any way related to the general "speed is going up but latency is getting worse" phenomenon of hardware in the last decades?
- Aldipower 1y agoYes, I think this is a on point statement. :-)
- GuB-42 1y agoYes, back in the days, I/O was often really low latency because memory and therefore buffers were expensive and gate count was limited, it meant more direct connections, which meant low latency. The Atari 2600 for instance was known for "racing the beam", updating the image while it was being drawn on the CRT monitor. A latency measured in pixels rather than frames! It was necessary because the console didn't have enough memory for a framebuffer. The Atari ST is special for the inclusion built-in of MIDI ports, and it was made cheaply, which at the time meant direct connections and it resulted it low latency.
- zozbot234 1y agoYou can have low latency and low jitter today, but you will need to use a microcontroller not a general-purpose CPU. The old 16/32 bit retro machines are essentially microcontroller architecture devices with general-purpose computer peripherals, for pretty much the reasons you mention. But there are many cheap microcontrollers available today, such as the Raspberry Pico series.
- GuB-42 1y agoAnd when you factor in FPGAs, you can get down to the microsecond or less. Low latency is possible, it is just that priorities are often elsewhere. We like being able to plug everything anywhere. And I admit it is damn cool being able to connect a display, most kinds of storage devices, keyboard and mouse, all while charging my laptop on a single port, at any time. I may even be able to disconnect my laptop and put my phone instead and it will do something sensible. If you did that back in the day, there was a good chance for one of the devices to turn into a smoke machine. It comes at a cost though.
- dylan604 1y ago> If you did that back in the day, there was a good chance for one of the devices to turn into a smoke machine. Back in the day, you would not have been able to do any of this with one port. Each type of device had it's own uniquely shaped connector/pins combo. You were not going to connect your SCSI devices into the VGA monitor port accidentally. Closest I ever saw was someone attempting plug in a Mac ADB cable to the S-Video port, but that just resulted in bent pins. It just so happened those pins were on an Avid Film Composer dongle instead of a replaceable cable.
- YZF 1y agoI think modern general purpose CPUs are perfectly capable of low latency and jitter. The problem isn't the CPU, the problem is stuff around the CPU (mostly the operating system). The less deterministic aspects of modern CPUs (branch prediction, speculative execution, caches etc). happen at timescales much smaller than what you usually care about (and possibly smaller than the jitter specs on microcontrollers).
- b112 1y agops/2 keyboards trigger an interrupt. USB are polled.
- yencabulator 1y agoA modern CPU polls faster than it can handle interrupts. That can be done on every nth iteration of the sound producing loop.
- nailer 1y ago> The Atari 2600 for instance was known for "racing the beam", updating the image while it was being drawn on the CRT monitor. A latency measured in pixels rather than frames! Oh wow! I remember hearing that oculus were doing this on their devices and thinking it was new.
- weinzierl 1y agoThis is true, but in my opinion also misleading. Speed and latency are fundamentally different. Speed would be a Performance Feature in the Kano model, meaning there is usually a linear relationship between speed and user satisfaction. Latency would be a Basic Feature. Once you cross 7 ms (or 5 ms, or even 3 ms if you absolutely insist) you're happy, above that everything is absolutely unusable.
- Aldipower 1y agoYou are missing out the jitter. This is often the worst part of modern implementations. If there is a jitter of 4ms and peaking sometimes with 20ms, then a 5ms latency is still bad. This implementation is basically unusable. Like many modern USB ones.. The Atari has an absolute stable and extremely low jitter. Some guy measured it to 1µs. Cannot find the link though, sorry. So the Atari has low latency around 2-4ms with an extremely low jitter. This is execatly what you want from a MIDI clock and sequencer driving multiple MIDI devices.
- deng 1y agoHow do you think any professional works nowadays with MIDI? A good, modern USB interface (from Focusrite or similar) has a jitter well below 1ms, usually in the range of 200µs. If that is too much, simply sync your DAW with an external, dedicated clock, which will usually give you a jitter in the single µs range.
- Aldipower 1y agoI have a Focusrite and the MIDI timing is terrible. Sure, there is more to it then just the interface. With USB you just cannot guarantee a stable midi timing, because there is no good midi buffer implementation for it. Technically it would be possible, but no one cares.. Professionals using something like MIDI to audio converters via an VSTi plugin that takes midi signals, modulates them onto a audio signal (which can be easily buffered) and some dedicated outboard equipment converts this back to MIDI. If you are working with hardware synths, etc. this is the only option you have nowadays with non-vintage hardware. A lot of producers do not work with midi anyways, they use plugins, that's why it is some kind of a niche problem and there's not much talking about it.
- brudgers 1y agoNot really. MIDI is a serial protocol. At any given time only one message can be sent down the wire. [1] So on the beat, an implementation can send either the clock pulse or note on or something else. [2] If you send the clock everything else has to wait. If you send something else, the clock has to wait. Now with modern computers, you are also dealing with USB which is a low priority parallel protocol and has to coordinate with everything else a modern kernel does. Music is hard. [1] premium hardware sequencers sometimes have two or more Midi Out to reduce contention. [2] Midi Time Code solves this by encoding monotonic time into Midi and is how serious sync is done over Midi, e.g. in Hollywoood
- genewitch 1y agoWhat's the S in USB?
- snickerbockers 1y agoFWIW you can get excellent latency on a modern device but only if you run everything in real mode and forgo complicated buses like USB that are effectively network link layers.
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoI have the equivalent of a $500,000+ studio from my childhood, all in my laptop. You are concerned about a 9600 baud protocol. There is zero 'shame' on the 'present future' when it comes to music production tools. It is like one of the hugest bright spots/biggest equalizers. Best thing I did was go ITB. No headaches. No hardware maintenance on obscure hardware. No MIDI limitations or even considering of my MIDI chains. Just music making.
- bitwize 1y agoSome musicians still like to play instruments -- for them and their listeners, ITB production is seen as a cheat and not real musicianship -- and for them the lack of a stable MIDI clock on today's hardware absolutely does matter. A trained musician can feel time difference as small as 1 ms. Any latency or jitter greater than that and a perfect track could be ruined. As an aside, all-digital workflows take the joy out of music being made in the moment, by ear and by feel. There is no replacement, for example, for a professional sound engineer adjusting a mix strictly by the sound in their headphones and the feel of the sliders under their fingers.
- handbanana_ 1y ago> A trained musician can feel time difference as small as 1 ms No they cannot.
- an_aparallel 1y agoI really wish you could easily get somwthing like the Myster ST clones...seems like supply is spotty, and price seems pretty high. Id love an original if they were less marked up too...
- khazhoux 1y ago> Seriously the MIDI timing is unbeaten until today! I’ve got a full studio at home, but tbh i never know what people mean by this