Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!wuarchive!texbell!sugar!karl
From: karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Music-X
Message-ID: <4892@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Date: 7 Jan 90 16:54:42 GMT
Reply-To: karl@sugar.hackercorp.com (Karl Lehenbauer)
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston
Lines: 100

Is anyone using or trying to use Music-X?

Although it has received nothing but praise in all the Amiga literature, I
have found the program to be difficult to use because of bugs and unneeded
complexity of the user interface.

First as to bugs, here is a list of some:

	o when you stop playing in the middle of a sequence, Music-X
	  sends an All Notes Off but does not send a Sustain Pedal
	  Up command.  This causes voices on some synths to hang, until
	  the sustain pedal is pressed again and released.

	o The metronome is "just another sequence," and as such, it is
	  easy to accidentally kill it or screw it up, plus its trickier
	  to configure and less intuitive than some sort of specific
	  metronome gadgetry.  

	o It is difficult to use Music-X to create a bunch of sequence 
	  segments and stick them together as a song.  You can get
	  sequences to not play and create sequences that play other
	  sequences, but this is not intuitive, and appears to require
	  putting in the subordinate sequences a "don't play me"
	  command.  There is nothing like Texture's segments
	  where each segment contains all the tracks used by that
	  segment.

	o MIDI Time Code synchronization has bugs.  I used an Opcode 
	  Timecode Machine to read a SMPTE-striped tape and play MIDI
	  Time Code to Music-X.  Music-X would properly autolocate in
	  the forward direction if the tape was stopped, fast-forwarded
	  a bit and then played, but if the tape was rewound and played,
	  Music-X would wait until the time reached the last time it
	  had played, i.e. it will not autolocate backwards.

	  To get Music-X to "rewind" the sequencer, you have to select
	  internal sync, locate to the beginning, then select timecode
	  sync again -- ick!

	o MIDI Time Code synchronization causes problems with the metronome
	  sequence.

	o It is sometimes impossible to select events that are 
  	  clearly shown by the bargraph editor.

	o It is hard and quite time-consuming to select a span of events
	  greater than a screen in with in the bargraph editor.

	o garbage events seem to randomly appear at the end of sequences
	  if you hit stop while recording before the sequence has finished
	  playing.  These are often invisible or uneditable by the bargraph
	  editor.


As for problems with ease of use, as an example, here is what you have to
do to record a track:

Click on Record, a window comes up that lets you select options, even if
you don't want options there is something you have to click (as I recall --
not totally sure on that one), then you can click or hit a key to start
recording.  You then play in your sequence, click stop, select the track
to which you wish to save what you played with a click, then click a gadget
labelled "store" to write the record buffer into that track.  If there's
something already there, you get a requester asking if you really want
to write over it.  Of couse you almost always do, but that's a lot of
clicks.  Also, don't forget to click store, because if you play, you'll get
whatever was there before you last recorded, something I seemed to do
constantly.

Punch-in/punch-out, by default, do not stop playing the sequence you are
punching over.  You can select a thing in the record window described
above to make the punch mute the track being punched during the punch, 
but it is quite surprising that they went the other way by default, as
although it might be very rarely of use to not mute the target track,
one almost always wants it muted when punching.

Quantize is not readily available.  You have to pull down a menu and select
a different screen, then hit a gadget on that screen but, oops, gotta pull
down the menu and load that quantize module first, then hit a gadget on a
screen, then set the quantize amount.  But, next time you want to quantize,
you still have to pull down a menu (or hit an Amiga-X key combination,
which would of course speed up a lot of this stuff), select the other screen,
select quantize, etc.  There is no autoquantize-it-every-time capability
like texture has, nor does it ever become a totally simple and short sequence
of operations to do the quantize.

In conclusion, if you are coming to Music-X from a totally solid sequencer
like Performer on the Mac or Sequencer Plus or Texture on the PC (I haven't
seen Texture on the Amiga yet), you will find Music-X to be almost unusable.

I called MicroIllusions to report the bugs but they will only accept bug reports
in writing.  Thus far, I haven't mailed them in.

Disclaimer:  There may be ways to do some of the stuff that I haven't figured
	     out.  Also, I had a fairly crummy experience with MicroIllusions 
	     as a developer and I am developing MIDI software for the Amiga.
-- 
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--			 frood who really knows where his towel is."  -- HGTTG
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