how did you use to make music on DOS? ..

[r2101]

on DOS?

AMIGA!

:)

[RTaylor]

http://os4.hyperion-entertainment.biz/i ... e&Itemid=1

...Wonder if it would run on an IBM.

{Power5?}

[legendCNCD]

DOS? you mean AMIGA DOS?
How in earth anyone would have been LIKING to do anything concerning music with PC's? Except some lameass midi stuff maybe..

are you trolling or honestly this clueless about music heritage on computers? c=64/amiga had/has HUGE music scene.

Sorry if you misunderstood
I've done quite a share of mine using c64/amiga/pc trackers. Just throwing in some trollish Amiga reminder

[grymmjack]

DOS? you mean AMIGA DOS?
How in earth anyone would have been LIKING to do anything concerning music with PC's? Except some lameass midi stuff maybe..

are you trolling or honestly this clueless about music heritage on computers? c=64/amiga had/has HUGE music scene.

Sorry if you misunderstood
I've done quite a share of mine using c64/amiga/pc trackers. Just throwing in some trollish Amiga reminder

ahh ok

i've got a nice amiga emulator from cloanto (amigaforever) that i still use today. it's amazing how much you can still do on an amiga, even if you dont have the hardware.

[EnzymeX]

In '87 I was running my keyboard rig from a floppy based midi sequencer from a company called Entech that ran on my Commodore SX-64 lunchbox PC (with built in 5" color monitor). Hot stuff I was...

[toddyjoe]

I want to send a BIG THANK YOU to those starting and contributing to this thread. Even though I am old enough to know better (32), I never made music on computers in the DOS era. I have some old computers that are not too useful with the huge CPU demands of today's toys. I honestly never would have thought of DOS as having anything of musical interest in 2006. Boy, was I wrong! After checking out some of these links to programs, I am impressed with the well-developed GUIs and functionality on one of my old, low-power computers. It may not be the cutting edge of modern music technology, but it sure is better than using that old computer as a doorstop.

[RTaylor]

I want to send a BIG THANK YOU to those starting and contributing to this thread. Even though I am old enough to know better (32), I never made music on computers in the DOS era. I have some old computers that are not too useful with the huge CPU demands of today's toys. I honestly never would have thought of DOS as having anything of musical interest in 2006. Boy, was I wrong! After checking out some of these links to programs, I am impressed with the well-developed GUIs and functionality on one of my old, low-power computers. It may not be the cutting edge of modern music technology, but it sure is better than using that old computer as a doorstop.

It's easy to dual boot DOS and command-line linux. {Actually, you can just use a dos boot disk.} Linux has some nice command-line {audio {chuck, ecasound, etc}} apps and a lot more functionality when it comes to running a terminal. You could put together a pretty nice system with both. There's a few emulators as well. http://www.dosemu.org/ You might be able to take advantage of the benefits of both. {If you've got the system, you could run X as well}

[toddyjoe]

RTaylor, I already have an older 1997 Thinkpad laptop that dual boots Windows 98 SE and Puppy Linux strictly for low-power music applications like Ecasound. So I have the standard Linux base covered. However, I never considered a bare command-line Linux system as an alternative to DOS so I may look into that. Thanks for the comment!

[RTaylor]

RTaylor, I already have an older 1997 Thinkpad laptop that dual boots Windows 98 SE and Puppy Linux strictly for low-power music applications like Ecasound. So I have the standard Linux base covered. However, I never considered a bare command-line Linux system as an alternative to DOS so I may look into that. Thanks for the comment!

I used to run it that way all the time. It's a much better alternative than dos. You get multiple terminals and so forth. With lynx/links/etc and emacs or mutt you've even got a lot of the communications stuff covered... high resolutions, sdl and svga stuff... if you could get a decent tracker running in a terminal, learn to script chuck's command line synthesis.. http://www.music.princeton.edu/winham/cmix.html , csound... lisp and so on you'd have a pretty nice system for just about everything. With some of the monitoring stuff you could run full screen, http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/OpenSoundControl/ etc you could integrate it into a windows network nicely...

http://vektor.ca/audio/ttrk/
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/sound/!INDEX /etc
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/apps/so ... INDEX.html

http://www.music.columbia.edu/cmix/

[reddrake]

Before Cakewalk I used the Voyetra Gold. It was the first propper sequencer and came with it's own midi port. I used it with a soundblaster (Can't remember but I think it was the SB16 - replaced it years later with the AWE32)), outboard keyboard (Juno)TR303 and a Roland soundcanvas.

I also used Voyetra Gold on an old Sound Blaster (8bit) (that I had upgrade from the CMS sound card) with MIDI interface. External Hardware was an old Juno Alpha and a Sound Canvas as well.

[meeks]

There was an old sequencer type program for the original macintosh that I use to use when i was a wee pup...anyone know what this was called?

[underface]

I'm joining this late in the game, but what about the old standby (and one of the earliest computer music programs) CSound? I ran it for years on a 233mhz toshiba laptop and learned more about music, digital audio, acoustics, and math than I did anywhere else.

It's definitely not the easiest way to do it, but it's quite possibly one of the most powerful options available.