Atariphile

Play it again Sam

I think I'm right in saying the first thing people do when connecting a CD-ROM drive to their Atari is play an Audio CD, even if there's a perfectly good Hi-Fi designed specifically for the purpose not three feet away.

With this in mind software to handle Audio CDs has become quite popular. This review covers one of the best, written by a programmer who has produced some outstanding applications, CAB and OCR are among his creations. Called simply CD-Player it's currently up to version 1.3f. The first thing to say about CD-Player is that it's Freeware but I'd encourage anybody using it regularly to make a donation to InterActive. By doing this we can be sure of continued development, not only for CD-Player but for the other great software Alexander Clauss produces. Anyway enough of my waffling back to the review.

CD-Player plays CDs! No surprises there I'm sure, but it also carries out many extra operations to keep you away from your Hi-Fi's player which is not nearly as useful.

CD-Player can carry out all the usual functions associated with a typical CD player including skip track, shuffle, scan, pause and program, time display which can be toggled through total time of disc or track and time remaining of disc or track. Nothing unusual so far, in fact, pretty much everything a standard player offers so let's get to the extras.

Included in the play-mode functions you'll find a play block operation. This is great for playing sections of your favourite tracks over and over again. Using the mark block keys you select the section of the track you wish to listen to, or dare I say, record [tut, tut, tut - FFF]. When the player starts to play the section in question left click on the 'A' button, at the end of the section you're marking as a block left click on the 'B' button. CD-Player then keeps the block details in memory for you to manipulate as you see fit. The block, once selected can be played back as we've already mentioned or, more usefully, using a built in export track function recorded to your hard drive (Your CD-ROM has to support this function, most up to date CD-ROM drives do).

The export track function allows you to pick the file type used - DVS, AVR, WAVE, SND or AU - when the track is saved as well as selecting between Stereo/Mono, 16/8 bit or whether you want the saved file compressed or not and its frequency. The frequency can be picked from a pre-defined list or you can enter your own value. CD-Player will then calculate the file size from the track picked or the block marked so that you can see what hard disk space you require. It's a very simple procedure and is idiot proof. This will prove to be just a toy to some but musicians will find it very useful indeed. Now you can get all the samples you want.

The average everyday user will find CD-Player's database facility and its cassette calculator far more useful.

Put a CD in the drive and CD-Player allows you to enter Artist and track titles. The next time this CD is used it will display the CD and track titles in its window. There's also a popup which allows you to pick tracks by name.

The cassette calculator is a really handy little feature. CD-Player will calculate for you how many tracks from the current CD will fit onto one side of a C60, C90, C120 or a custom size that you can enter. No more running out of tape before you get to the end of the track. [Not that Kev would record the above CD - FFF]

CD-Player can be run as an accessory under normal TOS and works well as a program under Geneva and MagiC 4. I haven't tested it under MultiTOS but I'd assume it would work well there too. It can be used in conjunction with MetaDOS or ExtenDOS without problems. In fact in many months of use it hasn't crashed once. CD-Player is a truly excellent piece of software, you won't go far wrong with this.


E-Copy the ultimate floppy disk utility?

E-Copy is yet another German product translated into English and distributed in the UK by System Solutions. Packed in the usual A5 plastic wallet is a DD disk and spiral bound manual.

Following the installation procedure as printed in the manual I was surprised to see the installation had failed! You are asked to enter the serial number from the disk followed by "A keycode, which you have to invent, this is a private and personal code" - wrong! There's a keycode in addition to the serial number printed on the disk. Installation complete.

E-Copy is a disk copying utility which can run as a program or accessory and is multi-tasking aware. The main interface is sensibly organised with the commonly needed features on view and the rest tucked away in drop down menus. The interface is both attractive and functional with keyboard shortcuts for most actions.

Most of us have seen manual disk parameter settings in other programs such as Fastcopy 3. By increasing the number of sectors and tracks on a disk it's possible to squeeze every last extra byte of storage space from a floppy. Clicking on one of the preset format buttons you will see the disk parameter settings change to indicate the relevant number of sectors and tracks. It's a shame E-Copy does not display the bytes each of these settings would create.

When copying E-Copy can be set to check the destination disk and only format it if needed which is a good time saver. If used in conjunction with the Get Disktype option the destination disk will be formatted to the same settings as the source disk. If a standard sector size is selected (9, 15, 18 or 36) the Fast Format option can be used to speed up formatting of unformatted disks. Multiple Jobs is useful if you a pile of disks to work on - it's much more than a multi-copy option and can be used for writing, formatting and erasing disks. During copying, if the source disk is too large to fit into memory, E-Copy will read and then write the first portion of the disk to as many disks as your require. Pressing Read On will read the next portion of the source disk ready to copy to you disks. You can set up a GEMDOS hard drive partition as a buffer where data is written as a file during a copy action - useful if memory is tight. To protect against writing over valuable data there is an Analyse option. If enabled E-Copy scans disks for data before carrying out any destructive process (format, write or clear disk).

If you have a DD disk of data to copy onto a HD disk you'll like the Transcopy option. This reads the used sectors of the source disk into memory where the calculations are made to compensate for the new boot sector and FAT directory size before writing the data to the new disk. This also comes in handy to copy disks of the same density with different formats.

The quickest way to delete data from a disk is to erase its File Allocation Table (FAT) which acts as an index to what's where on a disk. It's much faster than deleting the files or re-formatting the disk.

During all functions a window containing an action bar is displayed to let you know how things are progressing. If E-Copy encounters an error - a bad sector for example - you will be warned, and depending on the task you are carrying out be allowed to take the appropriate action.

E-Copy Action bar Using the Read option you can read the contents of a disk into a buffer ready for copying. At this stage it's no different to using the Copy option. However once the data is in memory you can get E-Copy to create and save a 'DiskImage' file. This is a powerful feature because if the image is saved to a hard disk you can keep a *.DIM library of all the disks you need to copy. Depending on your TOS version you could launch E-Copy by drag-and-dropping an image file, or install E-Copy as an application to run when you double click on a DIM file.

The Boot Sector area is well covered with the ability to write an anti-virus to your disks. E-Copy will also check each disk you put in your drive for 15 of the most common viruses. Saving and loading of boot sectors is also available.

So there we have had a little stroll through some of the easy and useful E-Copy functions. I haven't mentioned E-Copy can handle Extra High Density [ED] disks - so long as you have a suitable floppy drive or investigated user defined formats because most of it went way over my head!

Running E-Copy as an accessory on a single-tasking system you cannot run or quit other applications. You can however load an application like Papyrus and continue to write your masterpiece (or E-Copy review...) while the accessory is creating multiple copies of a disk in the background. All works well - the screen updates are a tad behind my non-professional typing speed but it is not obtrusive. From time to time you are prompted to insert the next disk. I even managed to save this document to my hard drive while the floppy was being written. Excellent!

Using the 'Starter' utility which comes as part of the Window Commander package you can get E-Copy to be automatically launched and run a job. It's well worth writing the simple script required for each job you regularly have to carry out.

Overall a fine and professionally produced product well worth the asking price of £29.95


Stewart v1.03

And now for a bit of fun! Sometimes software comes along which serves no real purpose but adds something to your system you no longer wish to be without. Stewart is such a program. Stewart was inspired by the Mac Copland interface (Get it? Stewart Copeland).

Stewart alters the way MagiC looks and I love it. It runs from MagiC's APPS folder and is configured from a dialog called by holding the [Alternate] key down and left clicking in the menu bar.

From here you can alter various parameters. For starters you can have the menus appear with a grey background with 3D text and Nicelines (similar to the Let'em Fly utility program or Geneva, the dotted lines normally found between menu items are replaced with more aesthetically pleasing solid lines. You can even alter the colour of the menu cursor so long as you're running 256 colour (or higher) resolution. Mac screen displays always have rounded, instead of square, corners so naturally Stewart gives you a similar effect - I personally don't like this feature but the choice is there.

If you've ever been in the position where your desktop's been covered in windows from all your running applications you'll find the desktop click feature handy. A left click on any visible part of the desktop background and it's instantly topped.

You don't like the MagiC logo? Stewart can switch it off for you easily, no more getting you hands dirty in the MAGIC.INF file.

There are a few predictable incompatibilities - most menu clocks cannot cope with the grey menu background so Stewart provides a clock of its own. This can display the time digitally or using text - like the Fuzzy clock utility. Left clicking on the clock displays the current date.

Last but not least - and this is the feature that sold Stewart to me - are spinning dialogs. Forget the boring grow/shrink boxes supplied by Atari and replace them with Stewart's sexy spinning grow shrink boxes. These are fully configurable so they can be made to roll onto the screen sedately or at high speed. I guarantee these will have you switching on your grow/shrink box options again - I was amazed to discover how few applications still support grow/shrink boxes these days. So come on programmers put 'em back.

Stewart offers a welcome injection of class and in the process transforms MagiC making it look even more professional - that's a recommendation in case you're in any doubt!


[Home] [Info] [Back] [Next]