I’m wanting to load old songs from 33 years ago . i no longer have at Atari STE. i’m wondering if there’s a way to open old projects on a Mac. I’ve had a google about and it seems it maybe possible but the info i’m getting is either beyond my understanding or leads to dead ends.

i’m thinking the best way may just be to try and find an old Atari and have done with it.

cheers

Paul

Have you tried an emulator?

Paging @ mu:zines he’s the archiving expert.

Thanks @ Tomás Mulcahy !

Logic versions up to I think LP9 (iirc) could still open Creator/Notator songs directly.

(Creator songs are essentially MIDIfiles when it comes to the actual MIDI data, although the song format is proprietary.)

If you want help with this, you can PM me, or go via my conversion service at http://www.difficultaudio.com/logic

I converted all my old Creator and Notator songs to Logic projects without problems. I just checked to refresh my memory and I can still get Creator/Notator songs into Logic, so give me a shout if you need some help.

(This is assuming the files aren't on floppy disks btw - if so, you'll need to retrieve the files first, so you'll need something with a floppy drive, at least, to access them).

Wow! you are just the person I’ve been looking for. I will now go and find all
my old songs. One question, if i get a floppy drive is it possible to just grab song files from it on a modern mac and zip them or will i need a bit of software to be able to read the atari disks? ATM i only have them on floppy.
thanks for your help mu:zines and thanks Tomás Mulcahy for putting us together!

You’re welcome. I appreciate the spelling Atari discs are readable on a Mac. They’re basically MS-DOS format.

If they’re DD (720kB double density) you will need slightly hard to find older USB drives to read them. HD (high density 1.44MB) is fine. If you need such a drive I have one I no longer need, used it to archive Yamaha TX16W discs on a Mac 4 years ago those are DD. You probably don’t although it’s hard for me to remember what we used over thirty years ago!

No worries! I hate having old projects locked up in unreadable formats, so I"m always happy to help people recover their stuff.

So back when I did all my floppy recovery I was on PC, so whatever I methods I used back then won't necessarily apply to doing it now on a Mac.

Atari-formatted floppies (DD) are *almost* identical to PC floppies, but the one byte difference meant you'd typically need software to read the disks (unless you originally formatted the Atari floppies on PC, in which case they'd be readable on the PC).

Off the top of my head, I don't have a Mac method or list of software for recovering Atari floppies (I generally do file conversions, not physical media recovery etc), but I'm sure there is a way of using floppies to image the disks, and then extract the data (while I no longer have my Atari, I do have essentially a mirror of my system running emulated on my Mac, and these all support Atari floppy disk images).

I'm happy to have a nose around a bit later today and see what I can come up with in terms of software/procedures etc (I'm just converting a batch of 50 or so Legacy projects for someone right now.)

Might be best to take it to PM, or email etc (you can grab my email from the project conversion page I linked to above/in my sig).

Oh forgot about the byte thing. I found a Reddit thread. Apparently you can use dd command in terminal to make a raw disc image, as long as the USB drive can read DD disks. I would imagine the HXC app can read that as an Atari disc then you could get the actual files. That’s a guess, I can’t test if that will work as I no longer have Atari floppies.

If you’re lucky some of your floppies came pre-formatted, those would be MS-DOS and make the process easier. Anyone remember when floppies started being sold formatted?

Or there are other tools/utilities in the emulation space to let you access the files - eg you can generally mount floppy disk images in emulators etc.

I don't really remember pre-formatted disks being a thing in the home computer market, if so, they were usually sold at (much) higher prices, for example, to new sampler owners (especially when some of those samplers had no way to format disks at all!) - and back then, it was all about how cheap you could buy floppies for - formatting wasn't really a problem...

(I think I routinely formatted floppies with a utility that would make PC-formatted ones by default, at least later on in my Atari ST days...)

Considering the OP is the guy from Orbital, I'd love to hear those songs from 33 years ago if you ever retrieve them! I think I've been enjoying your music for about that long now.

Back in Mac System 7 days i moved Atari Cubase files to Mac I seem to recall an Apple System extension to read DOS but I don’t remember if I had to move them to a DOS disk on the Atari first. Must have done.

33 years? Shaddup we are not old

thanks all, that’s a lot of great intel there. i’ll get cracking with what i have and will be in touch mu : zines via your web site.

Glad to have been of service! it’s only the ones you’ve heard already! I’d like to have them back again as midi data so i can have a fiddle…

Atari STe with C-Lab Notator.

This got me thinking ... there was a little trick that we used with regard to reading certain floppy disks.

I don't recall the reason ... but it had to do with putting a small piece of tape on one of the corners of the floppy in order
for it to be recognized [?] .... something like that.

Anyone recall what that might have been about ?

This was about covering up the hole that the drive used to determine whether to treat the floppy as DD or HD... (Or sometimes drilling an actual hole in DD disks to use them as HD!)

No probs!

maybe it's worth mentioning, that I have successfully stored kurzweil floppies to the SSD in my MV8000. I can then actually write that disk back onto an empty floppy with its floppy drive. I should have mentioned that ages ago I guess. at any rate, I haven't tried floppies other than kurzweil, so not sure if there are any it won't handle. I'd have to have the relevant gear for the relevant floppy format to know. which I don't have. but who knows, it may work for lots of them. they might even be able to be backed up onto a CD, via its CD writer. something I haven't tried either.

Not directly.

Without an Atari, the safest and most convenient way to access those files is by making disk images using Omniflop (which is free!) on a PC. The PC must have a built in floppy drive to work properly - a USB floppy drive won't be able to make an Atari disk image.

To access the files on those newly created disk images, you'd have to use an Atari emulator (Steem, Hatari - also free) and copy the song files over to the hard drive.

You'd still then have to find an older version of Logic to read those files however...

This is probably the simplest way to access and copy files, but I wouldn't recommend loading 30+ year old disks without making images of them first.

To get song files off the Atari via floppy, you would still need to find and format a 720 DD disk to MS-DOS in an old PC. You could then use that disk to transfer files between the Atari and modern Mac and/or PC.

(Again, you'd still then have to find an older version of Logic to read those files...)

One final suggestion - source an Atari and 'Ultrasatan' SD card reader. Open song files on Creator and export them as MIDI files. The files on the SD card should be readable by Mac/PC.

P.S. hoping to hear the outcome of this ‘archive restore’. Would love to hear updated versions of ‘Deeper’, ‘Fahrenheit 303’, ‘Midnight’ etc.

The question is, does the op still have the Emax/EIII sample files?!

how come you ended up using Creator?
(most people seemed to use Cubase)

Well, I'm not Paul, but I'll fill in some details in the meantime:-

Creator was pre-Cubase. At the time Creator was released, Steinberg's Pro 24 was mature, but really as the first "pro" Atari sequencer, it was pretty basic, and the early versions of Creator leapfrogged it, and it was really much much better than Pro 24.

While Creator & Notator developed, Steinberg went away, threw out Pro 24, and built Cubit (renamed pre-launch to Cubase for legal reasons), which to some degree leapfrogged Creator/Notator in terms of features (which never had much in the way of a graphic arrange page).

But back then, with the Atari ST, you were either a Creator/Notator person, or a Cubase person. (As I'm still on Logic today, you can tell which kind of a person I was...

(I never really gelled with Cubase, and Creator/Notator were faster to use, as Cubase was quite demanding on the ST's resources, meaning it felt a bit slow and clunky.)

Part of reason Cubase became probably the most used ST sequencer, was a) that it was pretty advanced for it's time and b) pirated versions were available, so people could get their hands on it without paying the £300-500 or so that pro sequencers cost then.

everyone seemed to be using Cubase - but i saw my neighbour using Creator, and it looked like it was more focused on patterns, loops of different lengths - whereas Cubase is all linear arrangement page. which is maybe easier and more logical to relate to, but i missed patterns - and yeah clunky: i got fed up with bashing that mouse up&down

simple, i couldn’t afford Cubase at the time.

the final suggestion here seems doable. i’ll look into it. funny you mention those three tracks , they are all on my radar!

the emax 2/3 files are easier. i have those files on optical disks that can all load into my E4 , all work as expected with a small amount of occasional filter adjustments.

I do use this method as I occasionally write and transfer stuff from Atari Notator/Cubase from time to time.
(VGA monitor adapter and PeST mouse adapter recommended).

The actual file transfer process from Atari to Mac & PC is relatively straightforward - as long as you have an SD card reader slot on your Mac or a generic USB SD card reader.

Slightly more complicated is formatting the SD card, but I managed to do it using the tutorial below. Alongside Atari disk imaging/backup in Omniflop and creating 720k DD MS-DOS floppies, it's another reason why I keep an old windows XP PC hanging around...

Using SD Card / UltraSatan to Transfer Files:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddwDJn8CV8I

P.S. If you do go down this route make sure it's a 1040STE, preferably with one careful owner/light use - non 'e' versions of ST can be temperamental with hard drives

Seems a shame to export as MIDI, if more of the arrangement work gets preserved by importing directly to Logic instead? Like you’ll immediately see things you copied and pasted or looped, transposed etc. obvs the MIDI would be the same info but without being able to directly see how you arranged it.

No, I do not recommend this, when Creator songs can be converted into Logic projects directly, preserving almost everything, including real-time playback parameters, patterns, songs, pattern and track names etc.

Burning stuff manually into midifiles first adds another unnecessary conversion task per song, and you'll lose much of the songs' metadata etc. Sure, do this if it was the *only* way to get MIDI data out of these songs, or if you want to move the data to some other DAW that can't read the native song format, but for Logic, as the files can be directly converted, it makes no sense.

As long as you can image the disks, then the files can be copied off, and opened up in Logic (if Paul has old versions around, LP7 is the best universal legacy project convertor), or I can help with this if he hasn't.

Like I say, all my old Creator songs have been converted to Logic projects, and it works fine.

Exactly this.

i remembering seeing something like this on a friend's computer and it didn't make much sense. but it seemed like it could run patterns of different lengths - i only watched for a couple of minutes iirc a bit mesmerised. everyone else seemed to have 'MCA' copies of Cubase, which was quite easy to grasp, but doesn't really have a concept of patterns.

Creator was actually pretty straightforward - I learnt the core 80% of functions you need in one evening, and the rest over the course of the week.

The left third is the arrange list - just a list of patterns and which bar each pattern plays at (you can have up to four patterns playing simultaneously, that's what a/b/c/d means), the middle third is the pattern section with 16 tracks - it's showing pattern 6 "soloprt3" in the screenshot - and the realtime track playback parameters (Logic still has this same concept today, with the realtime playback region parameters), the the remaining third is the transport section.

There's just one other main page, and that's the Edit page, opened by double-clicking on a track. This has the usual event list, piano roll (vertically oriented, like an *actual* piano roll, not like it is in DAWs these days), and the notation editor if you're running Notator.

There are a ton of smaller windows, sync settings, the MIDI fader "RMG" window and all kinds of stuff of course, but the basic sequencer and edit functions are all quite intuitive, even for people new to MIDI software at the time.

I still have a lot of fondness for Creator, I did a *ton* of stuff with it.

I have 2 STe's with a Color and Monochrome Monitors in storage.
Also, the full package of Creator/Notator, with UNITOR ...

Over the years I had thoughts of powering one of them up, just to see ... but then was concerned doing that
on something that hasn't been turned On in 20-30+ years. idk ...

Indeed. It is simply a Cirklon or QY700 running on the Atari

More seriously, this was before my time. But I have a friend who kept using it way into the 2000s. I always loved the pattern concept.