Maarten de Boer wrote: >>environment? Tired of muse crashing on me, and >>Rosegarden is a lot to load into my limited 128MB >>RAM... ;-) >> >> > >To think that my Atari ST had 1MB of RAM and a 4 Mhz CPU, and that I >have never again seen MIDI sequencing as straightforward, reliable and >accurate (on any OS or platform) is rather sad. > > > Interesting, I feel the same about my use of Sequencer Plus. I also owned an Atari 1040ST for a while, but frankly I was put off by the whole sequencer & GUI thing. That was the main reason I was so disappointed by the sequencers that first appeared for Windows: they presumed a working style completely at odds with what I had become accustomed to working with an MS-DOS based sequencer. I'm not a keyboardist, I have almost no skill at playing a piano or any other keyboard instrument, and every GUI-based sequencer flatly assumed that the user would be working with a MIDI keyboard (or other controller). My personal working method was based entirely on Sequencer Plus's superb use of the qwerty keyboard, and my experience with the program gave me a very fast method for composing and editing MIDI music. The fact that the sequencer was DOS-based was also a benefit, since the entire machine was dedicated to running the sequencer, i.e., no multitasking found there, thus with better timing and performance. When Windows first arrived I had been using Sequencer Plus for close to eight years. I couldn't believe that the amenities I was so fond of in the DOS world had become instantly dismissable by the MIDI software houses, and I was very unhappy with Voyetra's decision to abandon the keyboard-centric design of Sequencer Plus. Happily, not much later I discovered Linux, then DOSemu, then the fact that Sequencer Plus would run under the emulator. To this day I still prefer to use Sequencer Plus, but that's also because my working method is itself so keyboard-centric. I don't disdain MusE or Rosegarden or seq24, I think they are all wonderful programs, but my methods don't work so well with them. Btw, if you really have a desire to use your Atari MIDI software again, check out the STEEM project. Xsteem runs many MIDI applications very nicely. Best regards, dp
