Labels:text | screenshot | font OCR: AM/FM PD REVIEW: DANCE DISK #1 AVAILABLE FROM: Thijs "Fox" v.d. Vossen Past Verhoevenstr. 20 54 BK Veldhoven THE NETHERLANDS From the low lands of The Netherlands came a disk to us this month, which was both original and enjoyable. "Dance Disk #1" is a kind of very basic "disk- magazine" for Amiga-using musicians who are much into dance/trance/techno music. It is all written and made by one person: Thijs "Fox" v.d. Vossen. The disk contains a few small articles, lots of samples grouped in directories on the disk, and some example-modules to go with the tracker-articles written. I tried first to "boot" the Amiga with the Dance-disk, to see what the presentation was like; but very surprisingly the disk wasn't bootable at all; so I had to load Workbench first, and then go from there. This is ok I guess, after all, when you don't make the disk bootable, you don't need any startup-scripts, library-files, device-files, c-commands or any of those things that take up valuable space on the disk - so the disk wastes absolutely *no* space on non-music-oriented files. I loaded Workbench, double-clicked on the disk's icon, and a window upened with *one* single icon inside. Upon double-clicking that icon, I was presented with the "documentation" for the disk - and this one text file contained all the text on the whole disk, with the editorial, instructions, tracker-tips, and sample- descriptions. Well enough, if you want to read it all in one go, this is practical (it really wasn't all* that much text, so reading it all in one go was no problem). But if you for example would want drea to print out the sample- descriptions or something like that, it would have been much more practical to split the various articles up into separate text files, and made some kind of menu-system, or at least, different icons for the different articles. and The editorial says that the disk is issued both as an Amiga-compatible disk, as a PC/MS-DOS compatible disk. Once again, when you make the presentation as basic and simple as this, I guess this is one of the advantages you get. Also, since, as the author says, the PC-users have "stolen" the Amiga module-format (they really have! - they use standard Amiga modules directly on the PC now), the modules and samples will also be PC-compatible. The articles were quite short, and the language wasn't the best I've seen, but nevertheless, there were some good ideas and some very useful tips to bring along for anyone using trackers (Protracker, OctaMED, etc.). After the articles, was a listing of all the samples presented on the disk, with a short description and a quality-rating of each* sample. That was a very nice touch! Another nice touch was the fact that all the tracker-tips-articles came with example-modules, which showed the methods described in the articles. All in all, a very "basic" presented disk and not at all flashy and funky in appearance, but filled to the brim with above-medium-quality material which will surely be both entertaining and useful for many tracker-musicians. Nice work! It's absolutely worth getting in touch with Thijs "Fox" v.d. Vossen for a copy of this disk. (Send something for it - like a present or some disks with some interesting material or something!) FINAL NOTE: We have extracted some bits from this "Dance Disk" and actually presented on this AM/FM disk! We have corrected the language a little bit, and separated the articles into different files. Looking at these files here on this AM/FM disk, you can get the general impression of what the disk was like. Ed. AM/FM
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