Old DAWs - nostalgia thread

[Scotty]

Awesome post, I can see your passion for this stuff. It was and is still magic to me. I have my SE30 here with Cubasis driving a Motu midi interface and recording into a Korg standalone 16 bit recorder. Makes me happy to have it around here.

Love DAW nostalgia. I am old enough to have lived through almost the whole cycle of consumer-accessible digital music production...


Today I'm on the latest version of Logic and I'm back on a Mac. The game changer there is Apple Silicon, but Logic isn't game changing relative to versions of Cubase Pro from a decade ago... which is kind of sad.

I'm still using the Yamaha EX5 as a controller, but everything is ITB now.

[lightsfadelow]

Awesome post, I can see your passion for this stuff. It was and is still magic to me. I have my SE30 here with Cubasis driving a Motu midi interface and recording into a Korg standalone 16 bit recorder. Makes me happy to have it around here.

Love DAW nostalgia. I am old enough to have lived through almost the whole cycle of consumer-accessible digital music production...

Was there a Cubasis before the iOS era?

[eLawnMust]

Good show lightsfadelow.... The interpretation of s 'DAW' is pretty loose nowadays, most throw in sequencers, trackers, MIDI whatever so it really don't make much a difference. There was certainly alot going on back in the day...

Here is an 'Odd-Baller' even by tracker standards... JAYTRAX which is a rather strangely designed tracker that was a commercial unit eventually made free-




Didn't prevent some from making great tunes in it especially Philip Wood... Really like his 'take' on his tunes... In this first one real nice use of Whole-Tone Scale Riffs mixed in with the standard types-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rAu2ugI1Cg

Some Whole-Tone Scale Riffs in this one as well-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4FkUAWHitA&t=4s

And funky cool vibes in this one as well-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m9Q84u1HyA

[eLawnMust]

AXS Rocks...

[dlandis]

I've got one that probably no one else can remember: SDA ProMIDI from a company in Texas. It's claim to fame was that it would write all data to the HDD (of my 4.77 MHz XT screamer) after one was done recording a track. It did this VERY slowly (due to constraints of the hardware at the time.) It was PC only. There is still a review of it online by Ian Gilby of SoS.

It was a fascinating idea and had a proprietary interface in order to facilitate this, but was it rather ungainly due to the lag in being able to work. And, if memory serves, one could only delete the last track recorded (as the program mixed the data as it went.) The company didn't last that long. After they went under, I went to Cakewalk 3 for DOS.

[liquidsound]

88787E43-0BCD-4165-957D-E038634DDE88.jpeg

I think I still have it somewhere….

[v1o]

It was kind of a pet peeve of mine. Everybody started calling sequencers DAWs. A DAW is the Digital Audio Workstation. The whole thing: computer, sound card, controllers AND the audio/MIDI/sound sequencer. No matter if it recorded audio tracks. A Korg Triton is also a DAW

I believe that's the old definition for DAW. At some point DAW stopped meaning workstation and became the name for audio/midi sequencing software.

[fmr]

It was kind of a pet peeve of mine. Everybody started calling sequencers DAWs. A DAW is the Digital Audio Workstation. The whole thing: computer, sound card, controllers AND the audio/MIDI/sound sequencer. No matter if it recorded audio tracks. A Korg Triton is also a DAW

I believe that's the old definition for DAW. At some point DAW stopped meaning workstation and became the name audio/midi sequencing software.

It's not the "old" definition. It's the only proper definition. At some point, someone ignorant decided to give sequencers another name... And lots of others followed

They were, they are, and they will ever be MIDI/audio sequencers.

[audiojunkie]

Some of you may remember Babaya Logic Pro. It was the talk of KVR back in the early days. I have fond memories of discussing the mystery of this DAW.



Edit: Where did all of the old posts go?! Were they lost somehow or does the search engine just not find them? Those old KVR conversations were incredible!!

Edit2: Ah! I remembered the name wrong!!! It's "Babya" not Babaya.

Edit3: Search found 1189 matches: babya
Searched query: +babya



Edit4: Wow! What a treasure trove of old KVR lore!!! Here's one of my favorite lines about all of it:

The Emagic Acquisition was one that I remembered. Didn't the Logic Pro developers get involved somehow? I seem to remember that as well.

They said that they'd send in he lawyers when they were done laughing.

[enroe]

"Babya Logic" seems to be some kind of very simple, rudimentary midi sequencer.
It was created as version 1.0 in 2005 and has not changed since then. It is still
available!

"Babya Logic" is obviously not related to Emagic Logic or Apple Logic in any way.

[Synthman2000]

Not a full blown DAW but a stereo sampler that I started to mess around with on the Atari. Microdeal Stereo Master

http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari ... 38671.html



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u16XbfpJDlc

I thought I was the man when I went from 512kB RAM to a full 1 Megabyte.

My very first introduction to music making was in the early 90's the studio was using Octamed on an Amiga... it looked a real mess to work with.

And I used Cubase when it was just a MIDI sequencer and looked like this:



Always fun times, also much more slow and difficult to get things done. I used to run Kenton MIDI stuff off the Atari and had something called a Tesseract added to the printer port I think to get another 16 independent MIDI's.

2023 is DAW heaven compared to all this.

[farlukar]

Where did all of the old posts go?! Were they lost somehow or does the search engine just not find them? Those old KVR conversations were incredible!!

IIRC due to horrible database management of PHPBB at the time and an underpowered server, a bunch of forum stuff from '04–'05(ish) got archived.
Sadly, despite software & hardware upgrades, the archive was never merged back in.
One can only assume it's all lost forever now

[audiojunkie]

Where did all of the old posts go?! Were they lost somehow or does the search engine just not find them? Those old KVR conversations were incredible!!

IIRC due to horrible database management of PHPBB at the time and an underpowered server, a bunch of forum stuff from '04–'05(ish) got archived.
Sadly, despite software & hardware upgrades, the archive was never merged back in.
One can only assume it's all lost forever now

It's a shame. A real subculture developed over the years here on KVR, and some of it is lost to time. However, if you'll notice above, I mentioned that I realized that I was spelling Babya wrong. I still found quite a lot of posts.

[eLawnMust]

Not a full blown DAW but a stereo sampler that I started to mess around with on the Atari. Microdeal Stereo Master

http://www.atarimania.com/utility-atari ... 38671.html



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u16XbfpJDlc

I thought I was the man when I went from 512kB RAM to a full 1 Megabyte.

My very first introduction to music making was in the early 90's the studio was using Octamed on an Amiga... it looked a real mess to work with.

And I used Cubase when it was just a MIDI sequencer and looked like this:



Always fun times, also much more slow and difficult to get things done. I used to run Kenton MIDI stuff off the Atari and had something called a Tesseract added to the printer port I think to get another 16 independent MIDI's.

2023 is DAW heaven compared to all this.

The top one actually looks pretty cool resembling Discreet Combustion in appearance...

Don't know about 2023 being DAW Heaven...If you can delete all the bloat & completely unnecessary features that get in the way. Remember those old sequencers ran on GRIM hardware with very tight coding. NOTHING today can run on anything even close to that kind of hardware needing to soak in 4-8-16 GB of RAM or more these companies should be embarrassed by such. Most all the 'tight' coders are gone...

[Synthman2000]

It might be the case that code was lean but having been there done it and owning the T-Shirt. running Cubase here is a dream. The power is absolutely immense and super value. I run tonnes of synths and processing software and produce sonic end results I am really proud of.

This was stuff we just had to suffer on the way. I also believe I am much better at producing and making music than back then so it is not as if cut down, limited, slow studio situations ended up with better end results.

Assuming you know what you are doing, with creativity, composition, sound engineering and good monitoring you can produce high fidelity hit music. The above 4 are the limitations. All else is possible on a pc and software.

Some soft synths take 150 - 200MB alone, (though most are 10-50MB) that is nothing to be ashamed of given what they are doing under the hood. For what I am doing no need for hardware synths. (I have just 1 exception and that is a Virus Snow) I do still have the same keyboard that I used in 95 and it works fine, Yamaha knew how to build a synth keyboard to last.

I have ran 160 track Cubase projects at around 10GB RAM use, just soft synths, drum machines etc and processing. (no sample libs) and that is on an ancient PC.

We are living in truly amazing times when it comes to DAW's. The old stuff is great the forerunners of the immense power we have today.