Atari ST/FM + Steinberg Pro24

The Atari, with its built in MIDI ports, fostered the development of some excellent music software. I used Steinberg Twelve initially and then its big brother Steinberg Pro24, which have the following relevant features:

• score based editing, although there are other views available which are occasionally useful, this is the most natural notation.
• step input of notes using a music keyboard, useful because I am not a proficient pianist.
• grid editing is useful for adjusting the note lengths quickly and accurately, particularly for long notes.
• logic editing is particularly useful for shortening all notes by one tick, ensuring that "simultaneous" NOTE OFF and NOTE ON events happen in the right order.
• adjustments can be made to all notes in a track, for example transpose an octave. This is useful because tenors sing an octave lower than their part is written (unless they have had the operation) so the feature ensures that the music looks right and sounds right.
• arrangements of any complexity are possible; this allows a given passage to be recorded once even though it may be used many times. So if there is an error, correcting it once cures the problem.
• each track can be assigned to a different MIDI channel. I use this feature to drive two Casio keyboards, each feeding a channel of a tape recorder, so that any of the four choir parts can be highlighted on the left with everything else on the right.
• there is a master track where tempo changes and time signatures are stored throughout the piece. This allows tempo changes to be used, for example, to produce a pause.

There are some aspects of Steinberg Pro24 which are not so good, particularly regarding the preparation of a master file in which several songs are recorded sequentially. Such a master file makes the tape recording process much less labour intensive because once it is started the whole sequence plays without attention. The snags are:

• although groups of patterns can be copied from one file to another to create the master file, mastertrack entries cannot. I have eventually resolved this by writing a program which will append the mastertrack of one file to that of the other, with a fixed two bar gap. So provided that each file has a final entry in its mastertrack, to mark the end, then a complete mastertrack for the master file can be built up. Alas, because I do not have a full definition of the format of Steinberg .SNG files, the program can only work with an empty file, i.e. no note patterns.
• where arrangements have been used, these have to be "flattened" by copying patterns before adding a file to the master. This is a tedious process but it is still worth using arrangements for the benefits discussed earlier.
• MIDI file import/export leaves something to be desired. This has not been a problem so far because I have not needed to use MIDI files but now several choir colleagues have PCs and want to help; MIDI files are a good standard interchange format. The snags are:
  • Pro 24 does not import mastertrack information; this is clearly by design, it says it is ignoring it. I have overcome this with a program IMPORTMT, which imports the mastertack data from a MIDI file into an empty .SNG file before Pro24 imports the note data.
  • Pro 24 says it is exporting mastertrack information but it doesn't. Again I have solved this with a program which exports the mastertrack information from a .SNG file to a MIDI file after Pro24 has exported everything else. (I do have a full definition of the MIDI file, so there is no problem adding information to an existing MIDI file.)

This page was last updated 28 July 2001

Brian Maskell