29 Jan
2017
29 Jan
'17
12:01 p.m.
On Sat, 28 Jan 2017 23:31:21 -1000, David Jones wrote:
Used to program on a C64. I wrote a Mandelbrot set
generator in 6510
assembler. Had to turn off interrupts to get processing time down to
many many hours vs the days it took in BASIC.
Fun times.
That is the issue with those old computers. The advantage was direct
access to hardware registers by the bus, but as soon as the
capabilities of the computers were involved, slow CPU and less
direct accessible RAM, the issues for those machines started. For MIDI
this means no noticeable MIDI jitter, because no layers were involved to
access the hardware and no real multitasking was involved, but they
only could operate with a very limited ticks-per-quarter-note
resolution, because the computer had limits to process the data. The
C64 so to say quantised MIDI events even with quantisation disabled.
Using SysEx in combination with other MIDI events was impossible.
"64k is enough for anyone"
http://dustlayer.com/c64-architecture/2013/4/13/ram-under-rom
Btw. it's not taken for granted that modern computers, when only using
software synth, IOW no external MIDI gear, are able to provide good
sync, when recording them. On Linux it works perfect to record an audio
track of a synth that is separated from the DAW. E.g. recording
Yoshimi with Ardour, Qtractor etc. everything is in sync. On my iPad
everything is in sync, as long as e.g. MusicStudio plays e.g. Animoog,
but as soon as I record Animoog using Audiobus, the MusicStudio Tracks
and the recorded Animog track gets out of sync. That's more annoying
than crosstalk and drop outs of sync tracks on analog tape machines was.
I spend significant less time with working around issues in the old
days, than I need to waste time to work around issues nowadays.
Perhaps iOS could benefit from Jack a lot, but Jack doesn't run anymore
on iOS and apart from this, more or less no app ever supported it.
There are different alternative available to Audiobus, but they all
seem to be less reliable than what we get with Linux, OTOH a lot of
proprietary apps provide what we don't get for Linux.
I haven't used a Mac PC for more than a decade and wonder if an AIO DAW
nowadays works without issues, for what ever work-flow and kind of music
we would use it. It does coast too much money and if Donald should makes
America great again, Apple unlikely will become less expensive ;). So
e.g. running Ardour on a Mac, to benefit from proprietary snyth on a
Mac is out of reach for me.
Regards,
Ralf