Subject: REVIEW: Music-X 2.0 upgrade
From: [email-masked] (Rick Adams)
Date: 29 Mar 1994 17:11:11 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	Music-X 2.0 upgrade

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	Music-X 2.0 is the long-awaited upgrade to the venerable Amiga MIDI
sequencer, Music-X.  It includes Notator-X, a new music notation program.

AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		Hollyware Entertainment
	Address:	PO Box 9148
			Marina Del Ray, CA 90295

	Telephone:	(310) 822-9200
	FAX:		(310) 390-0457

	E-mail:		[email-masked]

LIST PRICE

	$199.95 for Music-X 2.0.  I have seen it advertised in Amiga
magazines for $129.95.  The upgrade is $100 and requires sending in your
original program and utilities disks.

SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS

	HARDWARE

		MIDI interface and MIDI instruments strongly recommended for
		serious work.

		Memory requirements are minimal unless you want to work with
		lots of samples.  2 megs of Fast RAM should handle just about
		anything.

		A hard drive isn't necessary if you're patient.  No special
		CPU requirements.

	SOFTWARE

		The manual does not mention any special requirements.

COPY PROTECTION

	None.  Installs on a hard drive.

INSTALLATION

	Installs OK if you rewrite the Installer script.  It incorrectly
asks for the volume "Music-X 2.0" as the program disk when it should be
"Music-X2.0".

MACHINE USED FOR TESTING

	A3000/25, 2 megs Chip RAM, 8 megs Fast RAM
	50 meg Quantum internal hard drive
	40 meg Connor external hard drive
	Internal and external floppy drives
	Golden Hawk MIDI interface unit
	AmigaDOS 2.1 and 3.1 tested without difficulty

REVIEWER'S RELEVANT BACKGROUND

	I have been a professional musician for 12 years, and a Music-X 1.0
user for 3 years.  I use the sequencer primarily for theater soundtrack work.

REVIEW

	Acquiring this upgrade proved to be extremely frustrating. I haven't
yet tallied up the phone bill for all my calls to Hollyware trying to find
out why it was taking so long to ship; I don't think I want to know.
Suffice it to say that these people are masters of saying, "The check is in
the mail."  However, it *did* eventually arrive.

	The first thing I noticed once I opened the plain white box was the
194-page spiral-bound manual.  60 pages are devoted to Music-X, and 134 pages
describe the accompanying notation program NOTATOR-X.  The printing is poorly
done; screen shots are blocky, and the text is not particularly sharp.
Having never received the 1.1 upgrade, I cannot tell how much of the Music-X
information is new and specific to the 2.0 version; I have been told that
much of it is simply a reprint of 1.1 data.  The manual is terse at best;
it's more like a specification list than an instruction manual.  It does seem
to describe everything in the box, though.  (It even describes items that are
*not* in the box!  More on that later.)  I thought the original Music-X
documentation was some of the best I have seen for any Amiga software, so
this poorly printed booklet with its frequent misspellings and cloudy
grammar is a disappointment.

	It was immediately obvious that the upgrade as shipped is
incomplete.  No ARexx macros at all were supplied, although they are
described on pages 22 and 23 of the manual.  This renders the RexxEdit module
completely useless.  (RexxEdit is something of a misnomer, as the module has
nothing to do with editing.  It should be called the RexxExecute module.)
Additionally, no PrintEvents module was supplied either.  Since the ARexx
macros and the PrintEvents module were significant reasons for my decision
to purchase the upgrade (and both were specifically mentioned in Hollyware's
press releases and in the manual), this is clearly a problem.  In my many
phone calls to the company, I was also told by its president that there was a
protocol for the Yamaha SY55 included with the upgrade, but that too was
missing.  I noted with some surprise that a librarian for the Roland GR-1
guitar synth was included (I have one of these), but it seems to be capable
of storing only one patch at a time.  Since the GR1 is quite easy to send
bulk dumps to, while it has no provision for single voice dumps, I found this
perplexing.

	What is Music-X 2.0 like?  First, this is plainly a minor upgrade and
not a major change from version 1.1.  Let me quote from E-mail I received
from David Joiner, the programmer of Music-X:

  >     Music-X 2.0 is basically a bunch of features that I put in
  >for my own use. Anyway, I traded this new version to Hollyware
  >(who bought the defunct MicroIllusions) in return to some of the
  >rights to my other products. I don't know what their plans are.
  >Unfortunately, I'm in the middle of a killer project at the
  >moment and I don't have time to work on Music-X. (If I were
  >seriously going to work on Music-X, I'd throw all the code away
  >and start over from scratch).

	This should speak volumes.

	The interface hasn't changed at all; there's no support for overscan
screens, still no more than 9 sequences displayed at once on the main page,
no ASL file requester (although it is nicer than the old 1.0 requester...
damning with faint praise indeed), and no possibility of placing comments on
the sequences.  On the other hand, the program is stable as a rock; I have
yet to see it crash on my 3000, and the SUSPEND option works as it should,
allowing me to use my communications program without rebooting.  (Music-X 1.0
failed to release the serial device when exiting.)  There is a reworked
Quantizer module which adds a bit more fine tuning to the old one, a swing
module that allows the imposition of a dotted-note feel, and a new Selector
module that is extremely useful for doing things like remapping a drum
track.  A Scatter module allows you to introduce random elements in the
timing in an attempt to "de-quantize" rigid tracks; like most devices of its
kind, it is of marginal use if you want it to sound like a human played the
music.  The PrintEvents module ballyhooed in the advance PR is missing.

	Music-X now offers better control over Amiga samples, but as I don't
normally use them, I can't really comment on the changes.  I did notice that
the new panning option does not seem entirely reliable.  Overlapping notes
often go to the other channel.

	The most significant addition to Music-X (potentially, at least) is
the ability to have multiple MIDI ports.  Unfortunately, this requires
multiple serial cards with custom drivers; Hollyware supplies only a driver
for the Blue Ribbon One Stop Music Shop and the Checkpoint serial card (no
longer manufactured).  I asked the president of the company about getting a
driver for the MultiFaceIII, but he didn't know what it was and I have very
little hope that Hollyware will ever release *any* other drivers, so this
feature is useless at the moment unless you have a One Stop Music Shop. (In
that case, you will only get multiple MIDI outputs, since the One Stop Music
Shop doesn't *have* multiple inputs.)

COMPARISON TO SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	Those who have already used Bars & Pipes (B&P) already have their own
opinion.  I don't like B&P at all; I think it was written by non-musicians
for people who don't play real-time music, but who enjoy playing with tools.
Music-X functions for me like a multi-track tape deck whose tracks I can
edit later, its file size (both the executable and the performance files) is
quite economical, and its user interface uses color better than any other
sequencer I've encountered.  It has logical keyboard equivalents that are
easy to remember.  It is also very stable.

	The Mac has better sequencer software available, but it comes at a
hefty cost and there are some things you still can't do with some Mac
software.  (Try selecting discontiguous information in Master Trax Pro, for
example.)  On the other hand, Macs have built-in multiple MIDI port
capability without this nonsense of custom serial card drivers.

VENDOR SUPPORT

	I think the word I want is "nonexistent," but I'd like to see them
prove me wrong.  I have made so many phone calls to this company that my wife
is asking me about our phone bill; about fifty per cent of the time I get an
answering machine, about forty per cent I get the secretary (Lisa is very
nice, but she's not capable of answering technical questions or of making
management decisions such as "Yes, we will send you all the missing stuff
right away."), and maybe ten per cent of the time I get somebody else.
Exactly once, someone returned one of my machine messages; it took nearly two
weeks and it was Lisa who made the call. She wanted to know if someone had
ever gotten back to me.

A WORD ABOUT NOTATOR-X

	This program should not have been released.  It has so many problems
that a complete review would be a waste of time, and I have wasted enough on
it simply by trying to use it already.  Do not use this program unless you
enjoy looking at letters that don't fit where they are supposed to go on the
screen, rebooting the computer each time you try to abort a printout, or if
you think a music notation program should support any fonts (or point sizes)
other than the one supplied with the program.  Stick to Deluxe Music, or
better yet, switch platforms if you want real music notation software; it
simply is not available yet on the Amiga.

BUGS
	This version of Music-X seems quite bug-free.  It's the *company*
that's buggy.

WARRANTY

	If you receive a faulty disk Hollyware will replace it free for
ninety days.  After that they will replace the disk for $5.00.

WANT LIST

	I would really like to see some sort of level mixdown feature added.
Even B&P has automated mixing these days, but to Music-X the term "fade"
means "scale velocity" which is silly.  ARexx macros that deal with volume
levels would be nice too, but then at this point *any* ARexx macros would be
nice.  Music-X should support different screen modes and resize itself
accordingly so you can see more sequences than the nine allowed by the HiRes
Amiga display.

CONCLUSIONS

	This is basically a very good product, but as it is shipped it is an
incomplete one.  Music-X is reliable; but without the advertised ARexx
macros, the PrintEvents module, and the librarian/protocol additions, the
shipped product simply is not the one Hollyware is advertising.  Music-X 2.0
be considered a bug-fix only and not a new release, and the addition of the
highly buggy Notator-X should require monetary payment by Hollyware to the
user.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

	Copyright 1994 Rick Adams.  All rights reserved.

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