#81

It should be possible to take the HD out of the mac and clone it with something, maybe?

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#82

Great list! I’ll definitely have to check out some of these.

I have a G1 and love it to death. I live in constant, quietly lurking dread of it becoming abandonware one day.

Regarding old hardware - there was the Waveboy effects disk Soniq Demolition for the EPS16+ and ASR-10 that had the GrainStorm effect that is a pseudo-granular synth. The technical separation as I understood it was that it “granularized” from the entire sample versus the window of granular synthesis. A lot of the time it sounded more like a time stretch effect, but on certain samples (the shorter the better in my experience) it can do some really odd, nice things.

Petri from Sineqube looks EXTREMELY interesting. Again, much appreciated!

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#83

Yes, got it working on both my laptop and desktop. Haven’t delved too deep, just kinda blindly dropping things around and making “hard drives in their last throes” sounds.

My laptop is running Mac OS 10.15.7 and my desktop is the latest Mojave (keeping that one pre-Catalina for some old plugins).

I had some problems dumping the whole Turbosynth folder into the Sheepshaver Mac OS9 icon on my desktop. I had to take the files out individually and drop them in. On my laptop, I could drop the whole folder. :man_shrugging:

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#84

I have a G1 and love it to death. I live in constant, quietly lurking dread of it becoming abandonware one day.

i´ve not tried yet on my computer (mid-2012 w/osx el capitan), but byte order released a remake editor from/for the g1.

Regarding old hardware - there was the Waveboy effects disk Soniq Demolition for the EPS16+ and ASR-10 that had the GrainStorm effect that is a pseudo-granular synth. The technical separation as I understood it was that it “granularized” from the entire sample versus the window of granular synthesis. A lot of the time it sounded more like a time stretch effect, but on certain samples (the shorter the better in my experience) it can do some really odd, nice things.

i knew the waveboy fx and the pseudo-granular function. in fact, i remember reading a jan jelinek interview back in the day and he used it on his early works.

Petri from Sineqube looks EXTREMELY interesting. Again, much appreciated!

you´re welcome!

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#85

good to know about the Nord editor. getting a micro is an idea I keep coming back to.

I really liked working with axoloti and I love my patchblocks, but the patchblocks became abandoned/unsupported really fast, and while axoloti’s open source can be an advantage it also means things are constantly changing around, including hardware and I feel like this is going to mean loss of support and other related problems sooner rather than later. the idea of the Nord’s kind of being stuck as they were is actually part of the appeal to me, and the Nord’s prices and wider user base means I’m sure there will keep being support like this from dedicated users for a lot longer.

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#86

Don’t mean to go too much off topic but I love my micro and the g1. Also, see this, you can listen there.
So cool to dig into these patches by @pokk.
Wish there was a more active community around the nords, I know the facebook groups and the old forum but something more up to date would be great, maybe we should start a new thread.
And I just got a Titanium Powerbook G4 in pretty well kept condition… cannot wait to research the stuff you all mentioned above.

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#87

I tried the first version of Byte Order. It was a bit buggy. There’s a new version which I haven’t tried yet which I’ve read some positive things about. However, it can’t run old Nord patches made in version 2.01. Only Nord patches made under the last version 3.03 are supported. So if you have a deep patch storage (like if you might have downloaded every single patch from Electro Music and any other site you came across with Nord patches and combined them with your own to get to somewhere over 800+ patches…) you’ll inevitably get some duds.

Also, it’s allegedly a little picky with Midi interfaces. Lower end, cheapies apparently rarely work with it.

But it’s cool its getting attention still and updates, particularly for Mac OS, which is very heartening.

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#88

Congratulations on the G4! Everything listed above is awesome.

And thanks for the Nord patch link. I can now have over a 1000+ patches. PERFECT winter viral pandemic living!

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#89

I love this thread.

My favorite sound app was Macromedia SoundEdit

It’s basically the exact program concept I still use for editing, as I can find it - closest to it on the mac currently is SoundStudio, though Audacity is close, too.

What neither have, though, was SoundEdit’s pitch bend tool which allowed you to draw a pitch shape to contort something. Gave a totally psycho rubberband effect that I became addicted to, and in a way losing access to SoundEdit once I moved from OS9 was good creatively, as I was leaning a bit on that trick.

I’ve since found Pitch Bend, exactly as implemented in some SONY products and in some Izotope ones, but it’s still relatively uncommon.

But I managed at one point to get OS9 running on a later version of Mac using SheepShaver. The most difficult part of this was finding an actual boot disc for OS9, requiring a few friends to look for there install discs from macs back - one good friend (thank you Amy) found her’s and I was able to install OS9 for SoundEdit to run. Still took a lot of work to bounce back and forth but for working in SoundEdit was always worth it. Funniest part of those old applications is how easy they are to move back and forth from one computer to another. No real dependant libraries, just the SoundEdit app file itself to run.

I don’t know if SheepShaver works in 64-bit macs, but should still for anything running 32-bit OS. This video suggests you can now grab OS9 boot files from the web, making this process much easier.

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#90

went to put a second drive in the G4 for OS9 and… “oh hey is this thing all IDE??” I got 99 problems…

#91

I got this tip yesterday: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/vnc-server-350
Scrensharing of your old machine on your modern laptop. Apparently works quite well, even if there is some mouse lag.

I couldn’t get my powerbook to connect to wifi properly, so it’ll have to be ethernet. I wonder if I can chuck an ethernet cable between the two machines.

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#92

Everything old is NU again!

3 Likes
#93

Glad to see this is still enjoyable, thx for linking again. :nerd_face:

I was only thinking about my G1 the other day (as i moved it again, still unplugged :slight_smile:) i might have to see what i can do about that today. Reading all this enthusiasm for the G1 is great.

I hear you about a new thread or at least something new popping up in search.
I have thought a bit about creating a small tool set or something based around useable sounds. I think that immediacy of grabbing a patch with less dials assigned might mean the G1 makes it into more tracks/creations. I have a patch that is basically an 808 style kick triggerable from the Tom out of a 606, and that was often used. Dials for pitch, length and click.

I think it’s something around making something already solid sounding, useable and easily tweakable.

#94

Ah nice, yeah the version of Byte i tried although extremely exciting was really buggy. Will have a look at this today.

#95

Nice! I admire your persistence in getting these old abandonware apps up and running again. If you don’t mind, would you be willing to share the password? I don’t actually have a PowerBook yet but am hoping to get one in the near future when finances permit it. Feel free to PM me if you’d prefer not to share it publicly.

Yeah, and you can already achieve pseudo-granular synthesis effects simply by modulating the sample loop points. If the loop points are too close together it causes the sampler to crash and play back the contents of its RAM (even samples that had previously been deleted) with glitchy digital artifacts. This technique was used extensively on Hotel Paral.lel by Fennesz (on an ASR-10) and I believe Autechre also used it. You can hear a demo of that here (but also just listen to that Fennesz album because it’s amazing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxyCSHYIN6A. Ensoniq made some really unique and mystical instruments. To bring it back to old laptops, I read somewhere about it being possible to make certain PowerBooks crash in such a way that upon rebooting they will similarly spit out corruptions of whatever was in the audio buffer at the time of crashing alongside a bunch of digital noise, Stephan Mathieu made an album along these lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8wBp-hcFZw

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#96

I used the previous version of the Byte order G1 editor all though it was buggy, but since upgrading to the newest version of the Byte Order editor, I haven’t had a single crash using it in standalone mode. The previous VST version crashed all the time for me, but I haven’t thoroughly tested the new VST version, but the initial test run in Bitwig seemed like it had gotten a lot better. And through the VST-editor you can automate a lot of parameters, which is very cool.

2 Likes
#97

Re: SoundMaker and SoundMagic FX: I’ve found that quite a lot of times, the various Norris plugins will not change their process based on what is put into the GUI box, which will just result on the default setting always being used. Which is a shame.

#98

This is super interesting to learn.

#99

is there any way to get hold of this? can’t see any info about that on the page?

#100

Indeed. I have an EPS16+ and the loop glitch is super fun. There was also a bug in the EPS16+ line with the effects chip that made it incompatible with the GrainStorm effect on the Waveboy Effects disk (all the other effects on the disk work though). Generates constant random noise on top of the sound playing in the background. Pretty harsh stuff but can be interesting depending. But there’s no way to tell if an EPS16+ has the problem besides trying the disk. You can fix it by hunting down the later effects chips Ensoniq used in their DP4 and a couple other synths but those are extremely rare to find by themselves.

Course, it’s not too difficult like you say to replicate these kind of things these days. Put a randomly modulated LFO on loop start and end points, setup some patch or plugin to randomly pick samples - you’re pretty much there. But that loses some of the magic!

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