Merci pour la musique......and for finding time to chat with us. Shiuming Lai takes care
of the introductions...
Last December, at the Forum des Applications Atari exhibition, Joe
Connor and Al Goold enjoyed showing off Atari Computing and
Electronic Cow's music software to an intrigued French public and
met up with one of the famous names in the Falcon music scene.
Some of you are no doubt aware of the acclaimed Digital Tracker
and now it's time to meet its creator, Jaccard Emmanuel of
SOFTJEE.
![]()
SOFTJEE is in fact me. I'm 26 years old and I have a diploma in
Informatics. I started programming when I was 15 on an Amstrad,
then Atari ST, next Atari STe and now an Atari Falcon. I program
mainly in 680x0/DSP (and even 80x86!) assembler and a bit of C,
but also some other high-level languages such as Pascal and
FORTRAN.I first started serious programming on the Falcon. Before that I
programmed demos for pleasure and that was all. When the Falcon
was released in 1992/3 I was a student in Toulouse, a town in the
south of France.With four of my best friends I formed the Kamikaze group; there
was BIGEYRE Eric the musician, GARRIGUES Thierry the graphic
artist, CHANE-KANE Olivier and myself, the programmer. We all
bought Falcons when they finally became available and we started
to make some stuff together but Eric wasn't very satisfied with
the Falcon because there wasn't anything to make music like Audio
Sculpture.This started us thinking about a Falcon soundtracker and the
result was Digital Tracker. This only had 4 voices to start with,
then someone helped me (I don't remember who!) to extend these
first to 8, then 24 and finally 32 voices. Digital Tracker was a
strange experience for me because I had never finished software
before and I don't know how I finished it! I guess it was the help
of my friends and other people but I remember making a determined
effort to make time to program it and correct the bugs - a big
step in my programming life.
![]()
The first Digital Tracker release was a shareware version and with
the success I had in France and other countries, I continued to
add new features to this software. After contacting Frontier
Software they edited my software to version 1.2 and I took another
step to a commercial release.Frontier sold Digital Tracker for about a year before I took
direct control over my programs and decided to sell my products
myself. Digital tracker 1.9 was released in mid-1996 and I took it
to the French Atari show that year. There was a lot of interest so
I decided to start my own company (not easy in France) while I
began work on my second package, Digital Home Studio. DHS was
ready in June 1997 and I presented it at the Atari show 1997. Some
people have made some music with DHS which sounds like a remix of
DA HOOL or Twenty Fingers.
![]()
SOFTJEE was born in December 1997. I'm the only programmer and
boss but a lot of friends including ANDREU Cedric, FERRERE Franck
and Magnus Kollberg from Sweden have helped me a lot. As I have a
lot of taxes in France I have to make a lot of software so look
out for MIDPLAY, Expand and Live Machine too.I will certainly continue with other projects. The next is
probably a sampler but I'm also working on a DSP assembler for the
Milan project. I'm also searching for new software ideas for the
Falcon, so if you have an idea please let me know - time marches
on!For more information on SOFTJEE products look out for reviews in
future issues of Atari Computing and contact:
Mail: SOFTJEE, F-47200 LONGUEVILLE, France
Email: softjee@hol.fr
URL: http://wwwperso.hol.fr/~softjee
Digital Tracker 1.9For sheer convenience, soundtrackers are unbeatable - no MIDI
cables to mess around with, no synths to set up, they literally
turn your computer into an integrated music tool. Of course there
are limitations but the latest release of DT is blurring the
distinction of a tracker. It now incorporates direct-to-disk (D2D)
capability so that any part of the sequence may be either
internally generated or read off the hard disk in real time, with
the ability to synchronise to the sequence!
![]()
Digital Home Studio is an integrated audio/MIDI sequencer with D2D
and sampling editor
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |
![]() |