Tuesday, March 27, 2018

When I was in grade-school, my parents got an ATARI 8-Bit computer. Between my father, my mother and I, we put that machine through its paces. My father wrote a book and coded and used a grading program on it. My mother did our taxes. I played and wrote games and messed around with music. That computer sits about 10 feet away from me now, but is in questionable condition. It's been 6 months since I fired it up and lightning has struck our house in the meantime. I do not know if it still works. When we moved on to IBM compatibles, we got a lot of the old files off it using a modified drive that would write to IBM-compatible 5-inch floppies. since then, my father and I have done a lot of messing with these files, and here is some of it.

Part 1 Dan Bunten's Music Processor

When I was learning to play piano, one of the things my teachers always warned me about was "sounding too much like a player piano." Perhaps to remedy this, my parents bought me some music software for our ATARI computer, a music processing program by Dan Bunten (who later went on to write M.U.L.E and Seven Cities of Gold and even later became Danielle Bunten Berry and then unrelatedly died of lung cancer). The idea I think was that it could be the player piano, while I learned to actually play the piano. Anyhow, it made a pretty decent player piano, and was also capable of printing out 2-part scores on dot-matrix printers. I spent a lot of time messing with it, more time watching it be a player piano than actually composing or inputting songs, but still, I spent a lot of time messing with it. Unfortunately, I was never able to figure out how to read the files it produced, so the only things I saved from it were printouts which I then inputted into the next music program we got. Here are videos two:

CANON.AMP | LITFUGUE.AMP

One, a short modified arrangement of Pachelbel's Canon in D that came with the program, and the second, Bach's Little Fugue in Gm, probably my favorite piece of the Baroque era which I found a score for and typed in. Although a talented organ player ought to be able to play all 4 parts with 2 hands and 2 feet, I never quite got that good at playing piano, though at my best, I did manage Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody and Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor, Little Fugue was always beyond me, so I needed a player piano to play it for me. These are not as they would have sounded in Dan Bunten's program, but rather *almost* as they sounded once I entered them into:

Part 2: ANTIC Music Processor

Antic was a magazine devoted to Atari 8-Bit computers that came with pages full of code and disks full of software for those of you who didn't want to type it in by hand (though many did). I believe we got a subscription to ANTIC when the general 8-bit magazine we subscribed to before folded. ANTIC was the name of one of the chips in the ATARI computer. One month, the disk came with "Antic Music Processor" on it which not only sounded better than Dan Bunten's program, but had support for volume, rudimentary phrasing, and 4 independent voices. Nowadays there are ATARI Emulators for PC, but for a long time there weren't. But there were AMIGA modules. The AMIGA was slightly more advanced than the ATARI musically; it had the ability to sample sounds and replay them, basically it was a rudimentary sampling synthesizer. And the files full of samples and instructions for how to render them were called Amiga Modules. It took me a while but eventually I was able to create a program that could take Antic Music Processor files and produce AMIGA modules that sounded sufficiently similar. For me, that is. I never really released the program or files to the world because I wasn't 100% satisfied with the result. But now, I'm like what the heck, so here are videos of some:

AUGUST.AMP | CASCADES.AMP | EASY.AMP | ORINOCO.AMP | RAG2STEP.AMP | SPRING.AMP

And the good news is players like WINAMP and KMPlayer (though *probably* not Windows Media Player) still play AMIGA modules. So if there is any interest, I'll post the files for download. At the moment I can't find what I did with the program, but if there is more interest expressed here, I may put more effort into finding it so you all can do the same to your old Antic Music Processor files.