All was great for a while.
Logic and the Atari went well together. The system was
running well, with Notator Logic, Unitor, Human Touch and
Export for a massive MIDI system.
Then suddenly the Atari
platform showed rumblings of imminent demise, right around the time of the
rumored. Notator Logic 1.7 (Logic Audio Falcon, or LAF (sic), which
was to introduce audio recording.
Atari was an understaffed and ailing company in the early 90's as the popularity of Microsoft Windows and Intel 386's and then 486's began to shake the smaller manufacturers from the market with high resolution color graphics and digital audio possibilities. Atari eventually went out of the home computer business, despite the often heroic efforts of some 3rd party developers, in-house employees, and passionate user base, leaving the Notarians to struggle along with their aging STs. Atari did release two 68030 machines before its demise, the TT030 and the Falcon 030, but regrettably they were incompatible with Notator SL (but worked fine with Atari Logic--there was a beta version of Logic Audio Falcon introduced at one point, but it faded under the dominance of Cubase Audio Falcon, the ancestor to Cubase VST).
It was a sad day for
those on the Atari platform, as it meant no more software and the end of
Logic's development.
Logic Goes Mac
During this super-charged period of computer/software
development, Emagic took Notator/Logic to the Mac. V 1.6 was released
early in 1993. It appeared to be just like the Atari version. A
year later, in the cold of winter 1994, version 1.7 was released that was
designed for Mac System 7, required 8MB of Ram, and at minimum a 68030 Mac.
A whopping 600 MB hard drive was the recommended minimum. This
was a ground breaking event as audio had finally arrived in Logic.
Audio was delivered in the
young Logic via the DAE (Digidesign audio engine) made by the developers of
Sound Tools (right around the time they changed the name to Pro Tools).
The major audio cards for Logic were the AudioMedia I and II, SoundTools 2,
and the new Session 8 all by Digidesign. Depending on what you had
installed, you could expect 4 to 16 tracks of audio.
Logic 2.0 goes PC
It was 1995 and PCs were on
the rise against the Macs. The '386 and '486 processors were here and
Windows had evolved beyond its 3.0 release. The first versions of
Logic PC were far behind the Mac versions. They were still MIDI only
and from my experience, were not as good as the old Atari versions, and they
still did not take advantage of the PC's color screen. Emagic, always
generous, offered crossgrade deals from Atari to Mac or PC. Whichever
way you wanted to go, you could. PC versions 2.0-2.2 seemed to be an
attempt to get the MIDI system down right. On the Mac, 2.5 refined the
audio systems and now allowed you to use Apple's own Sound Manager for
audio, rather than getting a costly Digidesign card. These were the heady
days of the Mac Centris and Quadra machines, which cost about twice the
money as a 486DX2 PC, quite remarkably like the price difference between a
stock AMD machine and a G5 today. Logic Mac saw the introduction of
many features we still hold dear today--the audio quantize engine, the Time
machine, Audio Energizer, Silencer, and Audio-MIDI and Audio to Score
features that are still in Logic 7.0 today.
Near the end of 1996, Logic
2.5 is ported to the PC, designed to run on the new Intel Pentium platform.
A typical system would have a P90, 16 MB of Ram and a fast hard disk.
And a decent soundcard. The Soundblaster card of the day, the AWE32,
would not do. The higher end cards of the day, the turtle beach tahiti
(still in Tweak's closet) and the Digital Audio Lab's cards as an
alternative to the reportedly buggy DAE implementation on PCs. Though
I had Logic 2.5, I still used Atari Logic for MIDI and used used A Windows
3.1 audio multi track program in sync with time code. That, at least,
worked. These were not good days for audio recording on a PC. Windows
95 was released and just about everything related to audio broke
down--software, hardware, drivers. This was also the time when
internet discussion forums were taking hold. People would shout,
scream and break down and cry trying to get their expensive audio systems to
work on PCs. It was not happening.
