Before there was DIGITAL Performer...

[terrybritton]

I started with Performer 3.2 on a souped-up Mac Plus (with a piggyback board soldered to the Mac Plus CPU that upped it to 25GHz and permitted 16 Megs of ram, adding a Floating Point processor as well. Board cost me $500 used!)

We did a lot of multi-keyboard recordings into that unit. We once did a test "madhouse" recording to see if we could blow it up (cause the program to freeze up or crash) by sending it oodles of notes and controller information all at once. That little thing was pretty stable - it took a 4-minute barrage to crash it, and the recording was intact!

Very stable. Used it in several live shows as well. It is amazing to me how many of the MIDI innovations that were present in that single-floppy program back then are still just as they were then in today's DP!

Great beginnings!

Terry

[Babz]

I still have my floppy disks from that era. Jeez, I guess it’s been 30 years!


LONG LIVE THE UNICORN

[jloeb]

My first was OSC Deck (for Audio) paired with Metro (for MIDI sequencing). Metro was written by Carl Sagan's son Jeremy... the Metro update boxes always arrived in the mail smelling of cigarettes.

Deck/Metro. Together, they were the first real desktop DAW. 1990.

[SMS]

OMG... seeing that Performer 3 manual and disk really took me back for a minute. I started with Performer™ 1.22 on a Mac Plus around 1985. I was just remembering the other day how all the windows were custom-drawn, not Apple standard interface design. It's always been quite beautiful and elegantly designed.

Now, DP 10. ONWARD!

[DAWdler]

This must be the old fogey board! I’m in the right place.

I found my first disk for Performer. Version 3.68. I wish I had kept my old manuals! I also had Deck. Great for sample editing.
Then of course, I really enjoyed paying hundreds of dollars each for the 4Meg RAM chips on a Sample Cell card!!
In those old days, it would take soooo looong to boot up, load software, load samples, send patches from Unisyn to the outboard gear, tweak sounds. I’d lose all inspiration and get nothing done.

Much happier with the instant gratification of now.

[oldecuriosity]

Put me down as another happy user of Master Tracks Pro before jumping to Performer. That being said, anyone remember Dr. T's? Great software at the time (based in Boston, I believe). I had an issue once that needed technical support and the actual developer took the call to help me out. Hard to believe how music software has grown . . . .

[bayswater]

I started with Master Tracks Pro and then switched to Performer, I think V2.

Hey Phil, I also started with Master Tracks Pro on an Atari 1040 ST.

Same here. But it couldn't properly quantize triplets. I took it back to the store and they gave me KCS to replace it.

[Phil O]

I still have my floppy disks from that era. Jeez, I guess it’s been 30 years!

I took all my floppies to the dump several years ago. My first experience with Performer was at a friend's studio. I waited for MOTU to release Digital Performer before I took the plunge. Been using it ever since.