User Interfaces of the Demo Scene(datagubbe.se) |
User Interfaces of the Demo Scene(datagubbe.se) |
I wrote so many tracks on it, some of which played on local FM radio and in clubs. Fondest memories circa 1996-2001.
Only many years later, Ableton managed to create another DAW that got close to FT in spirit, which is don't impede the creative flow. A DAW written by actual musicians for musicians (hail Robert Henke aka Monolake!).
And recently, Bitwig pulled another stunt and married Ableton Live's simplicity with feature richness more typical of a heavyweight DAW league, without all the inherent clutter.
P.S. This seemingly turned into some kind of advertisement, but it's just gratitude from a devoted user :)
And if you think Fasttracker is complicated, wait till you try Protracker...
My favourite one was on a C64 disk mag called "Input". It looked roughly like this:
menu entry 1
<-> * menu entry 2
menu entry 3
-----------------------------
<-> a little space ship
* a projectile
----- the ground
Since the menu entries had gaps between them you could miss. You likely missed by accident even, because control on home-computers was not what we are used to today.
When you missed the projectile was reflected from the opposite wall and if you didn't dodge, it hit your own ship.
The little ship crashed to the ground and a tiny, just a couple of pixels, figure appeared complaining and dragging his broken ship off the screen.
I had no idea there were tools for pre-calc lookup tables back then! Instead I just generated my own from code as I assumed everyone else was :D
Using pre-calc sine tables freed up so many clock cycles.
Big shout to all the sceners on here! I really do miss coding 68k asm sigh :)
More seriously, most of the scene were teenage boys who were playing, not doing serious work. While some of the tools were mostly productivity focused (e.g. the assemblers, trackers), perceived cool-factor outweighed productivity for a huge proportion of them.
For the trackers in particular, while there were still the embossed metallic look and sometimes gradients, the dense UI is largely a factor of small screens (often down to 14" monitors) and very low resolutions giving you very little to play with. And the thing is, while it's messy, everything is there on one screen, and almost every tracker followed almost exactly the same principles and layout, so you learnt quickly enough.