#21

This thread is related and contains some nice links / info:
https://llllllll.co/t/abandonware-hunt/

When I’ll find some time, I want to try running TurboSynth under SheepShaver

Some crazy sound starting from the 05:30 mark.

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#22

I just got TurboSynth running on OS9. Wow. What a sound. Still trying to find my way around it. If anyone has a manual, please send it my way.

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#23

God, that’s some amazing lo-bit sound in TurboSynth! Would love a manual, instructions, tips, or whatever if anyone has anything. I mean kinda fun to bump around, just found where you can draw into waveforms.

#24

you all are a bad influence. it turns out my MDD G4 is the last to boot into Classic mode. :thinking:

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#25

I’ve been looking for a download of the Rainey Xynthi patch now that SheepShaver is up on my one laptop. Do you happen to remember where you found that link? My searches are bringing up nothing but some tweet by Bob years ago.

#26

Glad to see this thread. I found my old powerbook g4 and some cdrs recently and have been thinking about getting os9 going on it again. The cd drive in the powerbook is broken, but looking into ways to install via a USB drive.
Would love to get max 3 (?) with nato running again, along with some of the netochka nezvanova patches/apps.

#27

Turbosynth had such a visceral reaction on me. Watching this is nostalgia.

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#28

Can anyone tell me how to go about prepping audio files for use with Turbosynth? When using the sampler module, my imported files (bounced on a modern laptop) simply won’t show, but will play fine with a media player, say SoundApp. I even tried to convert the aiff files in SoundApp to sounddesigner, wav, and aiff again, just in case it likes being converted within OS9 itself better. No luck so far.

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#29

I actually am using an OS X version which I got from a Twitter link. Not sure what @ansgaria is running.

#30

See this vid, starting from 04:30.

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#31

Lovely, now it works. Thanks.

#32

Same. My fascination with this period went into overdrive late last year when I became obsessed with the music of Oval / Markus Popp, in particular his work after 95 Diskont up to the So album. During this period, Popp was primarily using SoundMaker with the SoundMagic FX plugin suite to process audio (sourced variously from CDs and a Waldorf Microwave XT). You can hear these fx, which include granular and spectral processes as well as waveset distortion, on every single Oval release between 1996-2003, including the Microstoria records and So.

Apparently the Mego patch programmed by Andi was called “Paris”. I’m fairly certain that this is what Fennesz used for “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)” (his first laptop production) as lloopp didn’t surface until 1998. Fennesz’ second album, Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56’ 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51’ 08", seems to be mostly lloopp, you can hear in particular the granular synthesis acts all over that record. But I understand he was also attempting to make his own rudimentary patches. By Endless Summer I’d guess that it was a mix of lloopp, Pluggo and possibly some Supercollider stuff. But who really knows.

Some other stuff to check out:

MSP Granular Synthesis patch v2.5 (2000) by Nobuyasu Sakonda
Thonk by Audio Ease
Argeïphontes Lyre by Akira Rabelais

Hopefully soon I’ll be able to get an old Powerbook of my own. Especially excited to try the SoundMagic FX plugins, afaik the waveset distortion processes have yet to be implemented anywhere else outside of the CDP (which isn’t much fun to use).

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#33

Great insight.

Speaking of Oval, I’ve been playing with modifying a discman for about 2 years now. Using a model with the anti-skip buffer and connecting the legs on the bufferchip. Absolutely lovely sounds.

And speaking of waveset, it has been implemented in Supercollider as an extension based on the Wishart method. https://pustota.basislager.org/_/sc-help/Help/Wavesets.html

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#34

I should note that this is just info I’ve managed to glean from interviews, forum posts, Wayback Machine archives, etc., with a healthy dose of conjecture based on close listening.

If you’re a fan of Oval, you can still download the OvalDNA player from here, which is a Max/MSP patch that replaces the original Ovalprocess software. The included samples are really interesting. All seem to be taken from the Szenariodisk and Pre/Commers albums and they give a fascinating insight into Popp’s compositional process during this period.

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#35

there is a manual for Turbosynth on Macintosh Garden.

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#36

Somewhat unrelated, but I followed that link and discovered that Keith Fullerton Whitman now has a ton of music on Bandcamp!! This is wonderful news and I’m seriously considering subscribing to his music - he’s one of my absolute favorites. (Also, I randomly met him in the '00s in a bookstore in Kendall Square. He was very friendly and gracious while I babbled about being a big fan of his music. As an added bonus he was there with Oren Ambarchi – great day for meeting world-class musicians.)

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#37

It’s extremely “not laptop”, but I have been using some (really) old Digidesign hardware on and off for the past year. I wrote some words about SampleCell here.

I recently upgraded from a Quadra 700 to an 80 MHz Powermac 7100. This gave me an extre Nubus slot so I can use my ProTools hardware and the SampleCell together. It’s actually a quite modern workflow, in same way, but in glorious black and white.

I’ve also been learning Max using version 3, but I find its MIDI timing to be quite sloppy. It’s otherwise fun, but ultimately I don’t see myself making the investment in really learning it, at least not to make full compositions from scratch. Maybe I should try some made by others, though. I really like the look of the timeline, but on my system it has been quite unstable, unfortunately, with version 3.0.

Opcode/Cycling '74 M, though, is something I’m increasingly enamored with. Every time I think I’ve hit its ceiling and that everything I make with it sounds the same, I discover a new facet. Highly recommended. I think it’ll run on almost any Mac ever made.

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#38

Re: SoundMagic FX.

Any help on how to run the effects? I’m not quite sure how to go about using the effects. Terminal use? Plugins?

I’ve messaged Michael Norris himself to see if I can obtain a license for the full software. I’ve been using his real-time plugins for years, so I’m quite surprised to see his old software.

#39

fond memories of Audio Mulch and I recall really loving the Tobybear vst plug-ins

1 Like
#40

As a kind of parallel discussion: What do you think separates the design of these programs from modern tools?

When I was at UCSB, I had a discussion about a lot of these programs with Curtis Roads and he lent me an old laptop of his with most of these programs installed. I borrowed it for about a week, but it was wildly different from my workflow and I felt very slow at using them. It’s not a dig against these programs in the slightest, as I’ve mentioned before that the music produced during that period is probably my favorite period of electronic music.

Here are a few things that I think are notable:

  1. There was a big reliance on non-realtime behavior. What this meant is that this software produced a lot of artifacts to work with instead of only having your current automation lane.
  2. There are submenus and alternative behaviors for nearly every parameter/control. Pulsar Generator, as an example, is one of those programs that keeps on unfolding to show more things that you didn’t know existed.
  3. On the same point, I think that the workflow of these programs is unopinionated, meaning that nothing is really set in stone and every user has a different experience based on what they need/want. I think the loss of this is the major flaw of most software (especially operating systems) today.
  4. Fidelity is of course different. Part of this is down to sample and bit rates, but there’s also a lot of older DSP before we had access to cleaner, more computationally expensive techniques. Most of the oscillators alias, modulation is more heavily stepped, etc.

For people who have spent a lot of time with these, what else do you think?

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