I fired up dosbox to play some old shareware games lately and it made me wonder what might be some good old DOS audio programs to try and hunt down (for nostalgic purposes)?

Can you help me on this quest?

Wasn't there something called Amiga?
Found this :
http://www.opus.co.tt/dave/sound.htm

I don't think many DOS programs run in Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista/7.

In Vista/7 I wonder if it's a DOS box at all, just a command prompt console.

Anyway the hardware IO in Windows NT type of Windows are highly protected and you would need certain drivers to access hardware which is common from DOS programs.

I the 90's I found a driver that open up all hardware addresses in Dr Dobbs Journal. I used that for a TV-card at the time.

But Windows 95/98 did not have this kind of protection so DOS stuff ran just fine.

But I can't see any good reason to fiddle with that at all.

Lfm, Dosbox is a third party program that enables you to run old dos programs in Windows, it's not the default 'dos prompt' that comes with windows but kind of emulation. That said, there were some cool music programs for dos, like trackers (Scream Tracker, Fast Tracker) and even some softsynths later on like Audiosim and AXS (really cool, http://www.sonicspot.com/axs/axs.html) and some other that I can't now recall.. Damn I'm old

Try Impulse Tracker if you're into that kind of thing, it's just like Scream Tracker, but a lot better.

I love(d) AXS. It still runs on XP SP2 .

Voyetra sequencer plus. Midi only so maybe not a true DAW

Had to bump
Just downloaded Axs now, and it really is as good as i remembered
A whole DAW compiled to 350kbytes, with an above average sounding synth, that pretty fuc*ing impressive! It was ahead of it's time back than in 2001 and held great potential, pity the company didn't develop a vst version.

Yes, during the DOS era there were very few audio mangling programs and very few high quality soundcards to support them. Midi sequencing ruled the day and was excellent if you used an MPU401 to handle the midi timing. DAWs really came out after windows was introduced.

It's not freeware but cakewalk for DOS was available and included the CAL language.

I vaguely remember some proto-modular synth type toys as well, but I couldn't tell you the name for the life of me.

For DOS era I remember trackers(especialy Impulse tracker)

I really used to use an old version of Cakewalk (later Sonar):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWGUrQsJ7_U

I bought a bunch of classic computers to make a retro music studio. When I actually started trying to use them, what with the disks and lack of hard drives and pathway between downloading software from the web and getting it onto the retro machine... Bah. I think the most success I had with retro stuff was playing LucasArts games in SCUMMVM and DOSboxed Sierra games with a real MT-32 connected for music. I ran out of disposable income before I managed to secure interfaces between modern storage devices and classic machines with various non-standard I/O.

Retro is fun to think about but actually going back to the reality of the technology has been very revealing to me about how things have improved. But then, things have also UN-improved: bugs, complexity, load time, boot time...

If you want to relive the fun of Fast Tracker, just run Milky Tracker. Heck, run Apple IIgs, C64, Amiga and Atari ST emulators, for that matter. I should have!!

my fav DOS music player: http://www.cubic.org/player/download.html

That was my first sequencer circa 1987. I paid over $200 just to get the ram on my computer upgraded from 16k to 32k so I could run the damn thing!

The freebie calculators they give out at the bank have more memory than that!