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From a 386 with a sound card to a software studio, and from one home server to today's single keyboard.

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0. A 386 and an AWE32 1995–1998

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Andreas, WennE, had made techno of his own since he was 15, in tracker programs such as Fasttracker on an Atari 1040. Alexander, DjC, composed simple MIDI tracks in his bedroom, and when WennE, "who by then was a tracker boy came for a visit the whole project started to grow". [1, 2]

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The first work, Alexander wrote in 2003, was "Another Beat", made "with an old 386 DX 40Mhz, 4 MB RAM and a Soundblaster AWE32 soundcard". The 2000 biography is blunter about the machine: "a crap computer (PC 386, 40 MHz, it sucked even back then…), a midi keyboard and the famous pink noise generating, Soundblaster AWE 32". The sequencer was Commodore's Audio. [1, 2, 3]

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What money there was went into gear: a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with 12 MB for samples, then the first real synthesizer, a Yamaha CS1x. Reading up on it, the two found the CS1x Archive on the web and mailed it their own tracks: "the first step towards the WWW was taken". A Roland MC-303, a Pentium at 166 MHz and an Alesis Quadrasynth followed, all of it paid for by Alexander. [1]

4. Robbed 2001–2003

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From August 2001 the studio was online: "We've mounted a webcam sending out both video and audio around the clock", the band's site said of its Studio CAM, and Alexander later wrote that he had sent the stream to the internet radio station DI.fm "so that they could distribute our signal further". [1, 2]

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In the night between 13 and 14 January 2003, between 01:15 and 02:30, the studio was broken into and emptied, and so were three other studios on the same floor. Gone were the computer with about three years of original work, two Creamware Pulsar II cards, the Roland TB-303, a fully expanded Clavia Nord Rack and the power amp: about 85,000 kronor's worth, not covered by insurance. [1]

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The studio came back as software. In October 2003 Alexander listed the P4 with an Emagic Audiowerk 8 card, a MIDI keyboard, Logic Audio, "A huge load of VSTinstruments & FX" and a collection of AKAI sample CDs; the softsynths ran from V-Station and Reaktor to Stylus and Trilogy. Mastering was done "all in Logic", and at the end of the month a TB-303 emulation, Bass Line from Audiorealism, arrived from "yet another software sponsor". [1, 2, 3, 4]

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When "Lobotomized Unicorn", MISSION 2002 Release #19, came out on 24 September 2003, it was dedicated to the donors: "Major credits to all of you who donated your hard earned money so that we where able to buy a new computer". Some work never came back. An unfinished WennE track, "Lindas Theme", "was never fully completed before our gear was stolen". [1, 2]

5. The forum 2003–2004

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In September 2003 the band's old message board at epic-media.com "seemed to get overloaded or something - either way it stoped working properly", and on 24 September Alexander installed a new one, an Invision Power Board at trancecontrol.com/forum. By 9 October it had almost 800 posts. [1, 2]

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Four days later the forum lost much of what it held: "about 90 of the old topics are gone, lost, vanished". In the forum's preserved database 90 early topics have no date of their own, which fits that loss. [1, 2]

6. When the platform closed October–December 2003

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"I'm more concernd about how trance[]control is totally connected to MP3.com and vice versa - what'll happend when that connection break?" Alexander wrote. He spent that night downloading all 54 of the band's tracks, taking screenshots and saving the pages. He looked at Ampcast, beatmaka.com and CD Baby, and since he had a 10 Mbit line at home, he thought of hosting the songs himself. [1]

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On 17 December 2003, two weeks after MP3.com shut, the band opened its own download area at trancecontrol.com/mp3 as a "sneak-preview". The forum's passwords were encrypted and could not be carried over, so it got "a quick register / login interface that also will be used for our new mailing list". The band's web space had just been raised to 500 MB. [1, 2]

7. The Vault 2004

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It ran on one machine. "For now the Server #1 machine is only a PII 400 running a regular sql, php, web & ftp server," Alexander wrote on 1 March 2004. In January the MP3 files alone had used 65 GB of bandwidth, for about 1,000 members and 24 files. [1, 2]

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The listeners met its limits. "I have been getting mostly 'HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected' all day," one wrote that day. "Don't mind the slow download, but would like to at least be connected." The next day Alexander installed "a new un-capped webserver". On 26 March he apologised again: "Right now I'm on a 10Mbit connection and 2,500+ registered users will probably make that a bit slow." Another listener answered in April: "Don't worry about slow downloads, it's worth the wait." [1, 2, 3]

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Ten megabits at home was rare. In Sweden Bredbandsbolaget had offered 10 Mbit/s for 200 kronor a month since 1999, when a 56 kbit/s modem was the normal way online, but dial-up still made up nearly 84 percent of Swedish internet subscriptions in 2001. The telecom regulator put the share of Swedish households with a fixed connection at 21 percent in 2003 and 28 percent in 2004, and those with 10 Mbit/s or more at 4 and 6 percent. [1, 2, 3, 4]

9. Then and now 2006–today

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In 2012 Alexander set up a new studio, a 3×4 metre soundproofed room in central Gothenburg, and announced an upgrade paid for by that year's music sales: all revenue would "go back into the project instead of spending it on coffee and pizza". In August he drove off to fetch a 32-channel Soundcraft Ghost console. [1, 2, 3]

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The console was sold again. Studio 7, 15 minutes outside the city centre, was where Alexander, from 2015, designed a passive summing box of his own. Today the studio is a single M-Audio Axiom 61 keyboard and no other gear; the summing box is still not finished. [1, 2]