which is best for music Atari or Amiga

[bloodline]

Ral-clan is quite right, Atari music software didn't really get much love after the early 90's... Mostly just updates and bug fixes to existing software, from Steinberg etc...

[Linde]

That's an easy question to answer now, as the Amiga has a distinctive and unique grungy 8bit audio ability, the Atari only really had MIDI capability. Any modern computer will have infinitely better midi capability (most midi is sent via USB now), and also better software than any Atari... But I can still throw some Audio through my A1200 and use it as an FX box!

To be perfectly fair, the weird combination of sporting an at at the time quite primitive YM2149 together with the comparably modern 68k affords the Atari ST to have a quite unique and grungy sound of its own that I would say surpasses the Amiga by far in the qualities you mention.

[mrmoonlight]

Ral-clan is quite right, Atari music software didn't really get much love after the early 90's... Mostly just updates and bug fixes to existing software, from Steinberg etc...

 
 Hi I do thank every one for there input and I have managed to get a copy of Bars and Pipes for my Amiga ,but I just had to go and get myself the Atari st ,  so I have just bought this ,here's the read up
 
 This is an st on steriods! It is a 520 fm ramped up to 4 meg. It has a 1040 cover on it.
Fully working and not yellowing like most old computers. Pics dont do it justice. Comes with atari mouse, 2 joysticks which i forgot to include in pictures.( only tested one) manuals, power and ed leads, loads of GameS! Not tested every game as that would take ages with this kit! Ones i did try worked fine though.
Boxed Games are
Godfather
Shadoworlds
Elite 2
Battlezone
Railroad tycoon
Leisure %&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@! larry
Nigel mansells g.p
Winter olympiad
World soccer
The atari family curriculum.

A bunch of other original games and a whole bunch of quality demo disks with ideas and tasters of some other top titles. A few copied games too.

An awesome package!
  ps Thanks everyone Brian.

[commodorejohn]

To be honest, the human ear can't really determine any discrepancy below about 12ms, and at high tempo it is even less sensitive.

Maybe not as timing differences, but they can still change the relative phase of the sounds, and especially on heavily time-variant sounds like drums and bass, that can make a difference.

Music now has been commoditised, most people  just want to hear something that sounds like what they have already  heard, they don't have the same relationship with music that we would  have had many years ago. Music is easy to get and free. There is no  discovery or investment from the audience, hence little incentive for  creativity by the artists.

Well that's a damn poor excuse for not exercising creativity. Making good things is its own reward, and screw the people who want their same-old processed-cheese pop.

Anyway, yeah, the Amiga may be outclassed by modern gear if you look at straight specs, but specs-oriented thinking is a disease. Nobody ever listened to a '53 Les Paul and said "geez, it sounds so old! I'd be better off with something new and advanced!" Look at it as an instrument and the Amiga has a unique, gritty sound that's well worth playing with.

[itix]

Ral-clan is quite right, Atari music software didn't really get much love after the early 90's... Mostly just updates and bug fixes to existing software, from Steinberg etc...

To me it looks Atari was preferred by professionals and Amiga by amateurs :-)

I mean, music productions created on Amiga are mostly mod songs while on Atari some composers got their creations to hit charts.

[mrmoonlight]

To me it looks Atari was preferred by professionals and Amiga by amateurs :-)

I mean, music productions created on Amiga are mostly mod songs while on Atari some composers got their creations to hit charts.

Thanks very much for the info ,this is one of the songs that the Atari was involved
{
 
 http://youtu.be/lVL-zZnD3VU  here's the tune

This January, musician Jyoti Mishra - aka White Town - recorded "Your Woman" in his bedroom using an old multitrack Tascam and an Atari. Four weeks later, it entered the UK charts at Number One.

[persia]

What would you suggest as a modern music program?   Something that's good for amateurs?

The Falcon was a better machine for 1993, but I took the OP's question as looking at the machines now.

Back in the day, the Atari had better MIDI support and consequently more mature software. The Falcon just added good quality Audio to that.

Now, the cheapest PC/Mac will have better quality Audio, better software (for free), and better support for modern instruments (which tend to use USB over MIDI ports) than any Atari.

The Amiga on the other hand, can have a cheap MIDI box added, has some interesting software (some find these strange packages very creative, myself included) and still as a unique audio sound that can't be reproduced easily on modern hardware.


And yes. I will always throw my tuppence in a music thread

-edit- for the record I do actually have an Atari ST here, but I'm only keeping it around so I can see AROS run on it one day hahaha

[Iggy]

To be perfectly fair, the weird combination of sporting an at at the time quite primitive YM2149 together with the comparably modern 68k affords the Atari ST to have a quite unique and grungy sound of its own that I would say surpasses the Amiga by far in the qualities you mention.

I rather like the YM2149, so much so I've included it in a few projects recently.
Given a choice between an OPN2 or OPN3 chip and Paula, I'd take the Yamaha sound chip.

[rdolores]

Can't say anything about the Atari since I never had one.  But I had tons of fun with my Amiga's going back to the mid-eighties.  I pretty much used Deluxe Music on my Amiga for all my compositions and added MIDI-capability with an ECE MIDI interface and Casio CZ-101 synth, and mixed them with an old Radio Shack mixer fed into a Sharp receiver and outputted to my BOSE speakers.

I'd like to eventually output some of that stuff on to modern media so I can upload them to Youtube like this guy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orF17hcQwOc

Hi I already own a really good Amiga 1200 and a nice little Amiga 600 ,but I am very tempted to buy a Atari st  just for the devil of it and was wondering if any one uses one now and could say  which is best for music Atari or Amiga,,best wishes Brian.

[mrmoonlight]

Can't say anything about the Atari since I never had one. But I had tons of fun with my Amiga's going back to the mid-eighties. I pretty much used Deluxe Music on my Amiga for all my compositions and added MIDI-capability with an ECE MIDI interface and Casio CZ-101 synth, and mixed them with an old Radio Shack mixer fed into a Sharp receiver and outputted to my BOSE speakers.

I'd like to eventually output some of that stuff on to modern media so I can upload them to Youtube like this guy:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orF17hcQwOc

lol hey that's me doing the Amiga rock lol mrmoonlight  and now I am going to try some Atari boogie lol Brian.

[psxphill]

I've also heard about the Atari having very tight MIDI timing, and I've even heard some people complain about Amiga's sloppy MIDI timing.

This doesn't make any sense at a hardware level. The Amiga was multitasking though, so if the software wasn't written well then that could cause problems.
 
There is also http://aminet.net/package/mus/edit/camd which tried to become a standard, but I don't know how good that was.
 
Or you could use a c64
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BICygZRkKF4

[Ral-Clan]

To me it looks Atari was preferred by professionals and Amiga by amateurs :-)

I mean, music productions created on Amiga are mostly mod songs while on Atari some composers got their creations to hit charts.

I think that was mostly due to the fact that the Atari had a built in MIDI interface, while for the Amiga you had to buy an add-on.

If a non-tech savvy musician went into a computer store in the mid-1980s to buy his/her first computer for MIDI work, and the salesperson showed you two computers, but one had a MIDI interface built in (Atari) and the other did not, which do you think he/she would buy? Atari also marketed heavily to musicians because of this built-in feature.

That's pretty much the whole reason why Atari is more recognized in among musicians - but there's nothing the Atari could do that the Amiga could not.

Besides, lots of Amiga musicians got professional exposure - one that comes to mind right away is Calvin Harris, but I'm sure there were loads of others.  The Amiga and the SunRise516 card means that a lot of Amiga composed music ended up on the soundtracks of TV shows and movies.

[itix]

Thanks very much for the info ,this is one of the songs that the Atari was involved
{
 
 http://youtu.be/lVL-zZnD3VU  here's the tune

This January, musician Jyoti Mishra - aka White Town - recorded "Your Woman" in his bedroom using an old multitrack Tascam and an Atari. Four weeks later, it entered the UK charts at Number One.

Jaakko Salovaara (you probably never heard him) was using Atari to produce dance few hits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JS16

[nicholas]

To me it looks Atari was preferred by professionals and Amiga by amateurs :-)

I mean, music productions created on Amiga are mostly mod songs while on Atari some composers got their creations to hit charts.

There wouldn't have been any Jungle or DnB without Octamed (Though admittedly lots of it was made with Atari's and AKAI samplers) and commercial music is mostly sh1te anyway.

[mrmoonlight]

Jaakko Salovaara (you probably never heard him) was using Atari to produce dance few hits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JS16

Wow you are right .this is what he said in a interview,he used both the Amiga and the Atari
 
  Why did you choose Cubase as your preferred music production software and how long have you been using it?
When I started back in the late ’80s I had an Amiga 500, which I used as a budget-friendly sampler, and an Atari ST running Cubase, which was controlling various MIDI equipment. It was this setup with a mixture of various synths, mixers and effects with which I made all my records up until 1997. I basically had a loop of 2-32 bars running on the sequencer and I mixed everything live to DAT, taking as many takes as needed, sometimes spending all day on a track, others making five release-worthy tracks a day.

[nicholas]

http://www.medsoundstudio.webspace.virginmedia.com/infocus/12/focus_Gavin.htm
http://blogtotheoldskool.com/?tag=aphrodite