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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Sat Jan 20, 2018 7:23 pm

Over the last year it has been great to have occasional contact with Talin, the creator of the Amiga sequencing program Music-X. He also created The Faery Tale Adventure, an early Amiga game with a Zeldaish (before Zelda?) feel, an educational game called Discovery which utilized the Amiga's built in voice synthesis, a thing he was responsible to bringing to the publics eye, as Commodore had buried it deep inside of their technical manual.

In this writing from Talin himself, he goes into why he felt he needed to create the program, his history with music, the history of Music-X, even some interesting history on his involvement in the Electronic Arts Deluxe Music program. There's some very nice nuggets of Amiga history in there that I think any Amiga fan will enjoy reading.

He's someone that's very passionate about writing, but he's been very anti Twitter/Facebook/Social media for some time (for himself, not others), I think it does kind of get to him that not too many might be interested in seeing his thoughts on various topics, of which he has some incredible insight on, to this very day with modern technology by the way. So I'd love for people to show this Amiga creator some love and get this one out there.

I'd appreciate if anyone wanting to share just links directly to his article, not my opening for it.


https://medium.com/@dreamertalin/music-x-b4abc68d6f78

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Jan 20, 2018 8:45 pm

That was an awesome read - thanks for sharing it here.

Talin might not like social media, but I did share his Medium post on Twitter (with attribution to you) and on Facebook (to over 17,000 people). He should get a little more notice, as he rightly deserves.

Frankly, that YT video he embedded half-way down the post of him on Computer Chronicles is pure gold! So good, in fact, I'll put it here, too.
UPDATE: I also put it on Reddit.

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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Sat Jan 20, 2018 9:48 pm

I didn't have the heart to tell him, but you really shouldn't be linking that YouTube video. I mentioned it in my making music video, that the creator of Computer Chronciles, Stewart Cheifet, has made all of his personal collection available on archive.org, but he's extremely angry that people have downloaded them from there and posted them to YouTube. They are free (for non commercial use via archive.org), but he really does not appreciate people showing the YouTube versions, which often times are linked to ads for profit endeavors, and even if not simply just do not have permission to exist. He also says that he never made any money off doing the show, that it was always a hobby. Which makes it all the more important morally speaking to adhere to his wishes. Talin's segment is around 9:40 into the show.

https://archive.org/details/amiga_2


Stewart Cheifet mentioning his thoughts on the YouTube stuff, and he's also talked about it elsewhere in a much harsher tone.

https://youtu.be/PXCwjoPLU4c?t=15m56s
Last edited by Shot97 on Sat Jan 20, 2018 10:52 pm, edited 5 times in total.

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Bulletdust

Posted Sat Jan 20, 2018 10:20 pm

Absolutely fascinating article, however I loved the closing paragraph:
Interestingly, although I still use Logic to create music on my iMac, I do not use any other Apple-branded applications — not Safari, or Face Time, Mail or any other. I prefer open-source applications that work on any platform (my laptop runs Ubuntu) and which don’t lock me in to a single company’s “walled garden”.
I absolutely love Linux and will not tolerate proprietary ecosystems as they take away from my 64/Amiga days where my PC felt like 'it was mine'.

User avatar
Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Sat Jan 20, 2018 10:28 pm

Yeah, he's got some great hard hitting stuff to say at times, but always in a nice tone like that. haha.

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Shot97
Detroit, MI, USA

Posted Sun Jan 21, 2018 12:21 am

There were a lot of interesting bits of information he shared there, but I especially loved hearing how his work on Deluxe Music 2 was responsible for creating the libraries that made Workbench 2.0 stuff backward compatible with 1.2/1.3 - He said they went on to license that, and that's a very important thing right there that I know I've used myself numerous times.

Although I guess people could look at that one as bad, in that it let owners of the older machines say "nope, no need to upgrade!" as my father did many times.

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Zippy Zapp
CA, USA

Posted Sun Jan 21, 2018 7:42 am

Excellent post. Thanks for sharing.

Very informative and a good read about the development of Music-X and the other projects he worked on.

You can see him demoing Music-X in this Computer Chronicles episode:

https://archive.org/details/amiga_2

I remember watching this when it ran here in the SF Bay area back in 1988ish. It didn't convince my dad to upgrade the 64 to Amiga though, so I had to buy one myself.





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