************************************ AM/FM ************************************      It doesn't happen very often, but occasionally     something new and exciting arrives to stimulate     the creative imagination of all musicians.     Now is such a time!         Its here!     The eagerly awaited upgrade to the highly acclaimed     MIDI sequencer for the Amiga Computer..         Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X V1.17             An Exclusive Review for AM/FM         By Kevan R.Craft and Gareth R.Craft         May 1994         When originally released in 1989, Music-X stunned the unsuspecting public with its array of multi-colour screens together with the software's ability to exploit the Amiga's multi-tasking capabilities. Music-X subsequently became established within the computer world as the most unique MIDI sequencer available on any platform. Then came the Music-X V1.1 upgrade, which improved much on the early version, and has universally become to be regarded as the most popular MIDI sequencer available for the Amiga computer. Initially selling at a retail price of £199, Music-X sold like hot cakes and if you do your research, you'll find you can still acquire the V1.1 program for under £30. Indeed, the popular British magazine - Future Publishing's 'Amiga Format' recently acquired the rights to Music-X V1.1 and gave the three disk set away as a cover disk, complete with offers to acquire the manual for £14.99 and even more offers for upgrading to Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X when publicly released in July 1994! Although the program is excellent for recording MIDI performance data and is more than capable of being manipulated with the keyboard and mouse for editing MIDI data, the one aspect lacking was the ability to transcribe musical notation in the traditional manner. Music-X V2.0 has addressed this omission and suddenly the world is your musical oyster. This has been achieved with the addition of the Notator-X program providing Music-X users with a FULL musical Notation package. The upgrade is in fact, not to be regarded as one but TWO individual programs! Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X are fully functioning and self-bootable programs in their own right, although both programs can multi-task and are interactive enabling the user to swap musical data between the two programs through the twinkling of a simple requester, but more of that later. The new Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X package comes as a 4 disk set with each program resident on their own respective floppy disks and each possessing an Xtras and Utilities disks respectively.. Beginning with Music-X V2.0, lets have a look at some of the new features implemented within the upgrade. Well, to begin with the program has retained its famous colour screens and its for this reason you could easily be mistaken, as was a recent Amiga magazine journo, that nothing has changed. Being dedicated user ourselves, we can firmly state that after reviewing Music-X V2.0 for AM/FM we've discovered at least 50 new features added to the program! Music-X V2.0 Coded by David 'Talin' Joiner (c) 1993/94 Hollyware Entertainment Published by Software Business SEQUENCER PAGE Firstly, the main Music-X sequencer page contains an extra option on the modules menu and this feature enables you to load a sequence track directly from Notator-X which you will also be running in the Amiga's memory. The ability to transmit on more than 16 MIDI channels has previously been a feature of Bars and Pipes Professional only but now comes to Music-X V2.0 With the implementation, and acquisition of additional hardware and a specialised Serial driver its possible to obtain up to 8 banks of MIDI OUTs each consisting of their own independent 16 MIDI Channels = 8 x 16 or 128 MIDI Channels. With the 'One Stop Music Shop' Card and the 'Triple Play Plus' MIDI interface from Meridian Software U.K. you can implement up to 3 banks of 16 MIDI Channels = 3 X 16 = 48 MIDI. With this professional MIDI Configuration and independent multi MIDI Channels external keyboards, drum machines, samplers and sequencers can be communicated via their own independent bank therefore eliminating any cross-talk and garbage MIDI data being sent down the conventional MIDI chain providing clear data transmission! Alternatively, you can now have the ability to construct one hell of a MIDI synth setup from Music-X which was previously the domain of the professional studio such as used by Evelyn Glennie! EDITOR - BAR/EVENT EDITOR From the Bar/Event Editor Page, the user now has further editing capabilities such as a new 'QAUNTIZE II' module which expands on the original. This feature possess its own musical note grid completely independent of the main Bar/Event Editor Note Grid! The Quantizer now has the ability to manipulate the start/stop with a slider, duration slider for settings and note values, offset slider for moving the ideal time grid earlier or later in time. This can be used to compensate for slow attack times of synthesizer patches or to give feeling of urgency or laziness. There is also a swing button which enables manipulation of MIDI note data in either direction EARLIER or LATER but this uses the Bar/Event Editor musical note grid for this very function by offsetting later or earlier in time by the clocks in the offset slider. The drumming term 'flam' refers to two closely-spaced notes. With the 'DEFLAM' module this allows you 'Delete', or 'Select' (for later correction) grace notes, finger crushes, voice doublings, unisons etc, that may have been un-intentional. 'Notes Only' forces the module to work on the musical note data only, when OFF, any event may be de-flammed. There is also a 'Sensitivity' slider used to set the maximum timing width between any two events to be considered a flam. Other range options include 'Measure difference', 'Max interval', 'Event Priority', 'Longest Duration', 'Shortest Duration', 'Earliest event, 'Latest Event', 'Closest to Grid', 'Farthest from Grid', 'Input Selection', Delete Grace Note and Merge 'Grace Note'. With the 'DEFLAM' option, you may exploit the nature of the flam in any range or simply remove it based on the priorities stipulated by you! When Workbench 2.0 was released it contained a curious accompanying text based programming language called 'ARexx'. For the majority of users who upgraded from the 1.3 Workbench they were disappointed by the lack of a basic programming language and for those new to the Amiga they were simply baffled by the need to erect an Arexx 'mast'! "What do you mean I have to install a MAST on my Amiga?" Well, Now Music-X V2.0 comes with ARexx modules which provide further aids to manipulating your MIDI data. If you're familiar with ARexx you can even produce your own custom ARexx modules for yourself, you could even submit them to AM/FM to share with other Music-X users. Because the ARexx mast is copyrighted, it is not distributed with the Music-X package but if you are the owner of Workbench 2.0 and above its simply a matter of following the manual's instructions for installation on the Music-X V2.0 boot disk or your harddrive. First we have the 'EAR TRAINER' which fills a sequence with random melodies designed to let you practice ear training without a human partner. It puts up a requester with various generation parameters you can tweek. The 'COPY TRANSPOSE' ARexx macro can be used to copy notes to a different channel (or to the same channel). It can also be used to transpose the notes as they are copied. Its handy for building a horn section out of a melody, or for other tricks like those complicated wandering string sections. With the 'TRIMEND' macro you can delete any events after the end bar line and it also reports how may events were deleted. This is a good feature for cleaning up quickly after using the space beyond the end bar line after say cutting and pasting drum parts.. INTERPOLATE SLOPE generates new Pitch Bend CTL or Aftertouch events in slopes between the gaps of existing events (Which must be selected first.) Handy for smoothing out choppy sounding pitch bends and creating beautiful fades in and out etc. The 'TIME STRETCHER' module can be used to seemingly expand or compress time in a portion of a sequence without changing the actual tempo. This module can assist in the use of the compositional devices of augmentation and diminuation where a musical theme is played twice as fast or twice as slow as it was before, or help adjust in an absolute-time sequence.. We both think these ARexx modules are really great and would love to see this aspect expand by Music-X users themselves. Who knows, we could see the possibility of a random generated sequence or series of sequences based on a fractal seed or even better an IFF picture of a fractal seed. Maybe real-time sampling could generate a Music-X sequence? Now that would be something to talk about! Another addition to the editing modules is the 'SCATTER' option which randomly offsets the start and stop times of events, moving them slightly from where there were. If used subtly this can soften the cold rhythmic precision of a quantized part. If used too generously can transmogrify it. Containing 'Amount', 'Scatter', Scatter Late', 'Scatter Early', Scatter Both', 'Scatter Distribution, 'Uniform Distribution', Slopped Distribution, and 'Bell Curve' you can perform statistically accurate manipulation of your events or randomly at will with the freedom of improvisation. The Previous feature of Music-X to possess the ability, during editing of individual sequences, to select chosen events was achieved by the 'Select' feature and the mouse to facilitate deleting, transposing or copying etc. Now Music-X V2.0 contains a new 'LOGICAL SELECT' editing module which is like a breath of fresh air! This new feature expands on the older feature and contains its own requester which enables you to select any type of event in any range, in any range of velocity and on any channel. One really useful feature of this new aspect of Music-X will facilitate easier re-mapping of single sequence drum parts for the individual user's specific MIDI synth drum mapping. Other uses will enable professionally crafted results interacting with the other editing modules once the now easier pre-selected data has been chosen. Next is the 'SWING' module which allows you to offset the timing of notes which fall on selected beats (not just every other beat as the quantizer II module allows). With options for 'Interval', 'Amount', 'Start/Stop', 'Start w/ Duration', 'Beat', 'Earlier' and 'Later', 'Selected'/'All' - the permutations are endless! If you've always wanted to provide room for a little feel or articulation out of a rigid beat structure in your sequence then this 'Swing' option is really groovy man! Finally, we come to what must be the most requested aspect to the Music-X upgrade - the ability to print from Music-X itself! Yes, they've done it. The print option allows the printing of events from both the Bar and Event editor and you can also stipulate whether this is either sent out as a file to be printed later or to the printer itself. This great new feature allows the printing of 'selected' or 'all' events and or either 'durations' or 'start and stop' times. Now you can study your Music-X compositions and arrangements with the aid of hardcopies! FILTERS PAGE A new addition to the Filters Page is the implementation of 'CONTROL MAPS' of which each Music-X data file can be configured to store 4 different maps. The basic General MIDI CTL map is provided as default containing the now MIDI standard specification for data such as CTL 7 for VOL, CTL 10 for PAN, CTL 1 for MIDI base Channel and CTL 3 for the newly added BREATH controllers. In fact there's 127 places for CTL features which each can be edited to suit the users own unique MIDI set up and which takes account for existing and expanding MIDI implementation without disregarding older MIDI synths. These CONTROL MAPS can be saved out from Music-X as separate files for later use and may be then further edited for other song or musical purposes. The good thing about this option is that the implementation provides the option of choice for the user with the further possibilities of expandability of MIDI in the near future. AMIGA SAMPLES Despite Commodore's failure to implement the much debated DSP chip this has not daunted the further development of new ideas and developments of further manipulating both SONIX and IFF 8 Bit samples from within Music-X V2.0. The first noticeable amendment to this particular aspect of Music-X is the expanded storage space from 16 samples to 64. Locating the samples is facilitated by a vertical slider. If this wasn't enough, the samples can now be operated via MIDI and can be manipulated with PGM No, Pitch Bend, Velocity and CTL 7 for volume and CTL 10 for stereo placement etc. If the DSP and 16 Bit sampling becomes available on the Commodore Amiga in the future then Music-X has been designed to both accommodate and manipulate this very function! Can't wait for that - please Commodore, implement this feature A.S.A.P!!!! LIBRARIAN The original Music-X possessed this unique Editing and Librarian and MIDI synth Protocol feature as part of the software and was way ahead of its time compared to the majority of MIDI sequencers available on other computer platforms. Although still part of Music-X there appears to be no changes except for a new 'LOOKOUT' utility for improved MIDI SYSEX receiving and transmission data monitoring. Attempts are being made to seek information from the software publishers concerning the possible availability of Protocols and Editors for the more popular synthersizers which have been manufactured since the release of the Music-X V1.1 and during the development of Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X. If there is any developments concerning this then it will be announced in AM/FM.. NOTATOR-X Program coded by Craig Weeks (c) 1993/94 Desert Software & Hollyware Entertainment Published by Software Business Now we come to the next important aspect to the Music-X V2.0 upgrade the inclusion of the Notator-X program. Firstly, as mentioned earlier, Notator-X is capable of being completely independent of Music-X, it comes on its own boot disk and with an accompanying utilities disk. Once installed in your system from either floppy disk or hard drive, the first thing to notice about Notator- X is the beautiful and aesthetic appearance of the on screen software. With a green pallet of musical tools and White simulated music tablature paper. After setting the preferences for your printer you will then be able to print high quality results from your notating efforts, (this aspect of the program also configures Notator-X's screen output and size of the music tablature) and believe me, the quality is quite stunning! If you wish to have both Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X running then we discovered that booting up with the Music-X disk from the internal drive was best and then executing Notator-X from the df1: external drive. Once Notator-X was loaded into the Amiga's memory you then proceed to workbench and load Music-X V2.0 thereby preventing Music-X from grabbing all memory which can happen at default. The only recommendation in order to multi-task with both programs is that your Amiga computer system possess 1.5 Mb or more of RAM. There are facilities for installing both programs onto your harddrive and we would recommend you bootup with Notator-X first! So, Notator-X can operate as a compositional aid which will then enable you to load your musical efforts into Music-X. Indeed, if you have composed some music, or sequences in Music-X, then you can also load this into Notator-X. As mentioned earlier, Both programs are fully interactive and can be totally independent of each other. The unique aspect of Notator-X is the ability to lay out any score configuration up to 18 staves and 32 tracks (more than enough for a band or small orchestra), in a very clever desktop publishing style program that can both load and save either Notator-X, Music-X and MIDI data file types. Notator-X's pallet at the bottom of the screen (can be configured at either of the top, bottom, left or right or the monitor screen), contains ALL the musical tools required for a composer, four Clefs for Pitch assignments, Note Values/Chords and Rests, and the Natural, Sharp, Flat, double Flat combinations of any key and notes, Grouping of Notes, Space Alignment, Tempo and all the unique ways of indicating musical expression - of how hard or soft the passage should be performed, for example. There is also a unique text feature for entering up to 5 verses of a song's lyrics. Indeed, Notator-X possesses yet another text feature in the so called 'Frame' mode which takes you from the musical note editing mode to a kind of desktop publishing mode, thereby enabling you to size/re-size boxes anywhere within the score (on any multi pages), facilitating any text input from your keyboard to indicate, well, anything you like! As with all desktop publishing software, the ability to re- size the headers and footers, margins, page size and numbering is also fully catered for. With the title and composer in the Notator-X score, together with page numbers in the footer, margins, chord names, subtle text musical indications, and lyrics, when printed as a hardcopy it wouldn't look out of place next to a professionally published score! With the quality of a laser printer you could effectively set up your own musical publishing company on your Amiga! As with all software developed since the advent of Workbench 2.0 and above, developers sensibly implement the wonderful world of the pull-down menus with the plethora of many options this provides. Notator-X follows this tradition and contains an array of pull-down menu options for further complimenting and adding to the options in the tool pallet menu. It could be argued that virtually every aspect of the Notator-X program allows any form of editing and manipulation of data, this is also true of how the software displays the score, either on screen and ultimately on a published hardcopy score. Initially, Notator-X boots-up with the screen display in Hi-Res interlace mode at default but the option to configure the screen display to Hi- Res non-interlace if the flickering causes any visual perceptual problems. Indeed, the software also permits three screen display sizes from small, medium (default) and large, this aspect can also be implemented and employed for printing out your scores in the three sizes specified. When in the default 'note editing' mode you are provided with a sky blue musical note cursor which is employed for entering the majority of musical information within the score and there is a CURSOR SCROLL option if implemented from one of the pull-down menus. Entering data in Notator-X is really quite simple and a breeze to do, just select the appropriate information required and press return on the Amiga keyboard and hey presto, you become Mozart in a minuet! If you require continual editing, as in continual across the page, then Notator-X enables you to do this and displays the score in bar increments across the screen. These increments can be scrolled of course (by cursor or the page scroller on the Notator-X pallet menu), in order that you may position your cursor in the desired location within your score for entering or editing musical data. In order to scroll though, you must have previously entered some data within your sequence of bars otherwise you cannot scroll through what you haven't got. (Make's sense really because you can't scroll through a document in a word processor unless you have a document to scroll through!) The majority of options, from either the pallet or pull-down menus, when activated will provide a specific requester with further options for either loading, saving as well as configuring the data in the score as either particular score notation and or for MIDI transcription, channels, pitch bench, aftertouch etc. All in all, Craig Weeks has coded a brilliant program here which contains a whole host of Amiga firsts with a notation package. Notator-X can accommodate any configuration of musical data, key, pitch, Clefs, repeats, slurs, ties, groupings and any other variation of manipulating music you care to mention within the confines of its total 18 staves and 36 tracks. With the printed output providing such professional results the only recommendation I could make to you is read the extensive manual that accompanies Notator-X in order to exploit fully this awesome software. Both Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X have tooltype options for further manipulating the programs and there's even some new and advanced ones been implemented for Music-X V2.0. The Music-Xtras disk comes with a new Music-X to MIDI converter and a Music-X to SMUS converter ( both ways), a new modules installation program for configuring and adding new ones when released in the future, for the Editing, Filters and Librarian modules, a new Lookout utility for MIDI communication and both programs come supplied with a harddrive installation script. Both programs have successfully achieved a 'user friendliness' approach within the software for which Music-X was originally so famous and the appearance, of which adheres to the Commodore Workbench 2.0 and above's guide lines for pull-down menus, windows, asl type requesters and gadgets, and is really very good! Developments are planned by Software Business to port both Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X to the PC and Apple Mac platforms to rival the much lauded £499 Cubase sequencer. According to the head of the coding team from Steinberg (Kevan rousted him in a recent software seminar at Making Music MIDI Show Wembley, London), Cubase will never appear on the Amiga platform and why should it when we've got Music-X and Notator-X! Revolutionary in their design, Music-X and Notator-X offer a plethora of features! Never before has it been possible for so many advanced, music processing performance tools, to be available in a single software package at this amazing price! These features, coupled with the speed of the Amiga (particularly the A1200 and A4000), help Music-X and Notator-X to set the standard by which others will be judged. Cubase look out! The actual date for public release has been set for July 1994 with an initial selling price of £149.99 complete with two manuals one for each program. The options for upgrading from Music-X V1.1 to Music-X V2.0/Notator-X will cost £90 complete with Notator-X manual and a Music-X upgrade manual to accompany the existing V1.1 manual. As mentioned earlier, the Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X are fully independent software programs and if looked at this way it means that when upgrading you pay £45 for each program, and that's what I call a real bargain! Software Business in the U.K are offering Music-X V1.1 manuals for £14.99 and upgrade offers for the recent Music-X V1.1 coverdisk giveaway in the Future Publishing U.K. 'Amiga Format magazine'. Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X represents the next generation - don't get left behind... Thanks go to ------------ Norma McCaskill at Software Business for supplying Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X for review and for her kind help and assistance. Craig Weeks of Desert Software for his personal communications and help concerning Notator-X and Music-X V2.0 Adrian Williamson for the loan of his 2 Mb 2 disk drive Amiga 600 so I could write this review Registered Trademarks and Copyrights ------------------------------------ Music-X V2.0 (c) 1993/94 Hollyware Entertainment and published by Software Business Notator-X (c) 1993/94 Desert Software & Hollyware Entertainment and published by Software Business Commodore and Amiga are (c) and registered trademarks of Commodore Workbench is (c) Commodore ARexx programming language is (c) Commodore SMUS is a (c) registered Data File Type by Electronic Arts Bars and Pipes Professional The One Stop Music Card Triple Play Plus (c) Blue Ribbon Soundworks and Distributed by Meridian Software. Cubase (c) Steinberg Software Amiga Format magazine (c) and Published by Future Publishing ------------------------------------ AM/FM will, in future issues, be supporting Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X and will provide a continuing series of help, tips and tutorials and news for both programs together with the traditional feature of publishing Music-X data files and now the new Notator-X data files on the magazine and the AM/AM Special Disks series.. (Am I right, Ed?) When publicly released, we'll publish how to set up Music-X V2.0 and Notator-X for different floppy drive and harddrive systems together with installing the ARexx mast for the Arexx editing modules.. Review written exclusively for AM/FM by Kevan R.Craft and Gareth R.Craft MIDICraft Compositions and Arrangements 12 Mount Road Halton Runcorn Cheshire. WA7 2BH. England. U.K. Tel: +44 0928 563762 4364 Words. ************************************ AM/FM ************************************