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From: paul@ism780b.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.micro.cbm
Subject: Re: Music software reviews
Message-ID: <54@ism780b.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 14-Aug-84 00:28:12 EDT
Article-I.D.: ism780b.54
Posted: Tue Aug 14 00:28:12 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Aug-84 00:20:14 EDT
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Nf-ID: #R:unc:-749400:ism780b:26500003:000:2414
Nf-From: ism780b!paul    Aug  6 22:02:00 1984

I have a couple of C-64 music programs:

Music Construction Set (Elephonic Farts) - I feel really stupid for having
bought this turkey.  There no SID control (11 or so predefined
sounds is all you get - pick 1 each for the upper and lower staffs).
Music entry/editing is cute but tedious.  The display is white-on-black,
no other option, which besides being boring is NOT one of the more legible
combinations on most TV sets.  The controls don't work well.  A sloppy
port of a toy program.

Musicalc (Waveform) - much better, but still not perfect.  They
call it a "synthesizer and sequencer" rather than a music
composer, and that's pretty accurate.  You can manipulate all the
SID controls to your heart's content while the music plays -- but
the music is limited to 240 "steps", where a step is equal to the
shortest note time in the piece.  You can manually switch between
any of 32 240-step "scores" and any of 32 different sound
settings (all in RAM at once).  Musicalc 2, which I don't have,
is supposed to allow linking scores together to make a longer
piece.  There's a realtime keyboard mode (recording or not), and
a graphic score editing mode (which I like better).  There is a
"modulator" feature for feeding back voice 3 into the SID
controls, but aside from that you can't have the program change
the waveform for you automatically during a score.  The real bad
news is that with all these features, every key on the 64 means
umpteen different things depending on which mode and submode
you're in, and whether the shift and/or Commodore keys are down.
It's the most amazingly modal (as in "what mode am I in?") user
interface I've ever seen.  Let's see, there's sound control mode
(with switch and slider submodes), several varieties of keyboard
mode, score edit mode, score/preset select mode, mode selection
mode....  But you can get used to it eventually.

Apologies for posting to news instead of the person asking about
music software, but I'm too lazy to figure out how to mail to him.
Besides, my opinions are sure to be of universal interest  :-).

Paul Perkins    --      INTERACTIVE Systems
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