Antic The Atari 8-bit Podcast

Frank Schwartz and Richard Lewis, Virtusonics   Last last year, I received a batch of Atari disks. One of the disks was labeled Virtuoso Play Mode Sampler — a music demonstration disk from Virtusonics, a company I had never heard of.   Thanks to some old articles in Antic magazine, I learned a bit about the product and the company. In 1985, Nat Friedland first wrote about the Virtuoso software: "Virtuoso is such a unique new approach to musicmaking that it's not easy to describe. ... Virtuoso gives you a user-friendly method of tapping the extremely fast and powerful changes that a computer can control in every aspect of music performance. It bypasses the limits of traditional musical notation and uses an almost self-explanatory color graphic display that delivers mathematical insights into the structure of music. ... In technical terms, Virtuoso is a sound generator that produces four voices from the POKEY chip. You can make instant real-time changes in the voices in any of six parameters. Four computers run