Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: barrett@cs.umass.edu (Daniel Barrett) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Deluxe Music 2.0 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.audio Date: 22 Oct 1993 02:59:15 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 874 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2a7ia3$4ie@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: barrett@cs.umass.edu (Daniel Barrett) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Summary: The moderator writes review too... how about you? :-) Keywords: music, audio, notation, scoring, MIDI, commercial PRODUCT NAME Deluxe Music 2.0 [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on October 23, 1993. Search for the text "[UPDATE:" to find updated information. -Dan] BRIEF DESCRIPTION Deluxe Music 2.0 ("DM2") is a program for creating, printing, and playing music using the Amiga's sound chip or MIDI instruments. It is primarily a music notation program rather than a sequencer, though it has some basic sequencer functions. A freely distributable demo version of DM2 is available on the Aminet ftp sites and elsewhere. This demo is based on an older version of the program and contains some bugs which have reportedly been fixed in the actual release. It also has saving and printing disabled. However, it will give you a reasonable idea of the program's user interface. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Electronic Arts Address: PO Box 7578 San Mateo, CA 94403-7578 USA Telephone: (415) 572-2787 The program was written by David "Talin" Joiner. LIST PRICE $100 (US). Mailorder price is approximately $80. An upgrade is available to owners of the original Deluxe Music Construction Set for $50 plus shipping. Call Electronic Arts at 800-245-4525, weekdays between 8am and 5pm Pacific Time, and have your DMCS manual ready. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Any Amiga computer. 1 MB RAM or more. 2 floppy drives or 1 hard drive. A printer is recommended. SOFTWARE Reportedly runs under all AmigaDOS versions from 1.3 to 3.0. ARexx is recommended. COPY PROTECTION Serial number protection. When you install the program, you are prompted for your name, company name, and program serial number. This information is then encoded directly in the program. A little window pops up for a few seconds and displays it every time you load the program. This copy protection is painless, and I find it completely acceptable. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 3000T, 8 MB Fast RAM, 2 MB Chip RAM, 210 MB hard drive. ECE MIDI Plus interface. AmigaDOS 2.1 (Kickstart 2.04 ROM). OVERVIEW The long-awaited Deluxe Music 2 is finally shipping. More than an update of the original Deluxe Music Construction Set (DMCS), DM2 is a completely rewritten program with a similar interface, created by David Joiner, the author of the MIDI sequencer "Music-X." For many years, the Amiga has had no professional-quality music notation programs; see the section "COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS," below, for more information. Does DM2 finally give us a pro-level notation program? I hope to answer in this question in my review. DM2 includes the program itself, a directory full of sampled instrument sounds, a few example scores, and a freely distributable player program called DMPlayer. This review will discuss the operation of DM2 in some detail, and then I shall focus on the shortcomings of the program. Unfortunately, this program really needs some improvement. VOCABULARY FOR NON-MUSICIANS You will need some musical knowledge to understand this review. Here is a little vocabulary that may help non-musicians or people who need a brief review of terminology. MUSICIANS MAY SKIP THIS SECTION. DM2 is a "notation" or "scoring" or "music transcription" program, which means that it is used for creating written music or "sheet music." A "score" is a complete piece of sheet music, either printed or on the screen, and consists of one or more "staves" (which is the plural of "staff"). A "staff" refers to the 5 horizontal lines on which we write traditional music notation. Typically, the music of one instrument appears on each staff, although some instruments typically use two (piano) or three (organ) parallel staves. A staff contains "notes" (indicating a musical sound) and "rests" (indicating a period of silence), plus various other symbols. If we want to write a note that is too high or too low for the staff, little extra lines called "ledger lines" are added for that single note. A single note consists of two parts: the "note head" or "head" which is the little circle indicating the pitch, and a "stem" which is the vertical line extending from the head, indicating the duration. A symbol called a "clef" indicates which lines on the staff represent which notes. Notes can be grouped together or "beamed" by connecting the stems with horizontal or diagonal lines. The music on a staff is separated into "measures" using vertical lines called "bar lines." A "time signature" determines how much music goes into each measure, and a "key signature" determines which pitches are appropriate to be used in the piece. (This set of pitches is called the "key" of the piece. You can use any pitches you want, but the pitches in the "key" are more convenient to notate.) A pitch that is not in the key of the piece is called an "accidental," and there are 5 kinds: sharp (raise pitch), double-sharp (raise pitch twice), flat (lower pitch), double-flat (lower pitch twice), and natural (undo any sharp or flat). "MIDI" stands for "Musical Instrument Digital Interface." This is a method of communication between a computer and an electronic musical instrument (e.g., synthesizer), or between two instruments, so one can control the other. Pressing a key on (for example) a synthesizer keyboard sends a message through a wire (a "MIDI cable") saying "Key number 23 was just pressed!" This message can be recorded and played back by a computer, causing the instrument to reproduce the note, or it can simply be sent to another instrument which will then play its "key number 23." (This is a VERY simplistic explanation suitable for beginners only.) The important thing to realize is that MIDI does not transmit any sound; instead, it transmits messages like "play this note" and "stop playing that note." A computer program or hardware device that records and plays back such information is called a "MIDI sequencer." If you are a non-musician who read this section, please send me e-mail telling me whether it helped you understand the review or not. (I am just curious.) THE CHALLENGES OF COMPUTER NOTATION The perfect music notation program still does not exist. The reason is that musical notation is very diverse, somewhat arbitrary, and quite difficult to get right. Here are some examples of why writing a notation program is hard. I am including this section because, in my opinion, some USENET readers do not know what I mean by a "professional" notation program. Let's start with the obvious stuff: correct output. Symbols should look correct, clear, and be free of "jaggies" when printed. The dots on dotted notes should be close to the notes they modify. Horizontal spacing should look "natural," and simultaneous events in different staves should line up vertically. Beaming can be a challenge. When several notes must be beamed together, we want the results to look both clear and natural. By clear, I mean that the individual beams should be visible and not overwrite any note heads. By natural, I mean that the beams should be at a "good" distance from the note heads and drawn at an angle that looks appropriate for the notes. If the notes are ascending or descending by simple steps, then beam angles may be easy to calculate; but if the notes are spread out all over the staff, should the beam angle upwards, downwards, or neither? The answer may depend on the notes that appear before and after the beamed ones. Chords can be challenging to notate if the individual notes are very close together. Note heads should not overlap too much to obscure each other, nor should they be so far apart that gaps are visible. This is particularly true when a chord contains a half step. Two of the most difficult pieces of musical notation for a program to get right are "ties" and "slurs." These are slightly arced lines -- similar to the arcs drawn in a paint program -- that connect two notes (in the case of a tie) or group several notes (a slur). These are difficult for a program to draw precisely because their size is not constant, they need to be diagonal at arbitrary angles (in the case of slurs), and they may need to extend between measures or even staves. A final challenge is that there are many symbols available in musical notation, and some composers even like to make up their own notation. Does the program support all standard clefs? How about non-standard time and key signatures? What if we want only 4 lines on a staff and diamond-shaped note heads (as in some medieval music)? What if we don't want any bar lines (as in modern classical music)? How do you notate the scraping of an aluminum can lid on a violin string? The ideal notation program would allow the user to draw his/her own symbols and add them (permanently or temporarily) to the program's musical vocabulary. We shall see how DM2 fares against these notational challenges. INSTALLATION Installation is easy. Simply click on the Install-Deluxe Music icon, and the Commodore Installer program guides you through the steps to put DM2 on your hard drive or another floppy disk. I had one problem when using the "Pretend To Install" option. After I choose the name of the directory which will contain the DeluxeMusic subdirectory and click "Proceed", I get the error message Sorry, an error has occurred Getenv: string too long and the Installer exits. I don't know if this a bug in the Installer or in the particular installation script. I think I've seen this happen before when installing another application. CREATING AND EDITING MUSICAL DATA My first test of DM2 was to invoke the program and start using it without reading the manual. I found the interface to be very intuitive. Three windows are presented to the user at first: the Score Window, the Tool Window, and the Piano Keyboard window. The Score Window is a blank score with two staves (treble and bass), 1 measure long. As you add notes to the score, a blank measure is continually appended. When you play back your score, notes get highlighted as they are played. The Tool Window contains gadgets which represent different kinds of musical symbols. Click on a symbol, the mouse pointer turns into that symbol, and you can insert that symbol into the Score Window by clicking on the desired part of the staff. The Tool Window also has tools for erasing symbols, beaming, and text entry. The Piano Keyboard window looks like a piano and is an alternate way to add notes to the score. Click on a key, and the corresponding note is inserted into the score. You can also build chords and insert rests. During playback, the corresponding keys on the keyboard are highlighted. The menus are pretty standard, conforming pretty closely to those in the Amiga User Interface Style Guide. Without the manual, I was able to figure out what most menu items do with only a few exceptions. That is, given a menu item, I could use it. The opposite gave me trouble, though: if I want to do some operation, how do I execute it? I had to hunt quite a bit for some operations. For example, to control the global amount of space between staves, I guessed to look under "Score Settings" first. Nope. It's under "Staves." Little ambiguities like that made the program a little bit hard to use. But these are small complaints -- once you read the manual, it's no problem. DM2 has a reasonable amount of notational flexibility, but it has some unfortunate limitations. For example: NICE FEATURE UNFORTUNATELY... ===================================================================== You can set the number of The number of staves must remain staves. constant for the entire score. You can change the clef in Clef changes are allowed only at the any measure. beginning of the measure. Note values from whole note No grace notes. all the way to 64th note Important symbols available These are font symbols only and do like fermata, C clef, not affect playback. "dc a fine", etc. Automatically numbers your No page numbers. measures. Insert text into the score. No score title, author name, page headers/footers, piano fingering. So while DM2 has some nice features, I wish it went a little further than it does. Once really nice feature of the program is that you can leave various requestors (really they are windows) open while you edit the score. Other programs force you to close the requestor before you can continue working. In addition, while playback and printing are going on, you can still work with the program. (Though this sometimes leads to trouble: see the "BUGS" section.) Now for the bad news: Deluxe Music is missing LOTS of important features that prevent it from being a professional-level notation program. I've already mentioned grace notes, score titles, page numbering, and piano fingering. Some more are: o Accent signs (that look like ">") for notes. o Double sharps. The double flat exists but only as a font symbol with no meaning for playback. o Glissando markings. It is also missing basic features like: o Rests inside a set of beamed notes. (For example, putting a beam over two 16th notes, a 16th rest, and a 16th note.) o Full-page view of the score. o Cannot drag notes on multiple staves simultaneously. o Cannot align a group of notes -- all you can do is align an entire measure. o Clef changes cannot occur in the middle of a measure. o Key signature changes that reduce the number of sharps or flats should produce a key signature with naturals in it, indicating visually which sharps/flats have disappeared. Or if the change occurs in the first measure of a staff, a good program will place a indicator of the change at the end of the previous staff. Deluxe Music doesn't do either. It's also missing professional features like: o Cannot design your own symbols easily, except by editing a font and memorizing which symbols correspond to which ASCII codes. o Cannot change the number of staves within a score -- you must use the same number of staves throughout the score. o No N-tuplets for N greater than 7. o There is only one size for notes and staves. o No mezzo and soprano clefs. o No Baroque-style ornamentation (in a tiny staff above a note). MEETING THE CHALLENGES In the section "THE CHALLENGES OF COMPUTER NOTATION" above, I listed some things that are difficult to do in a notation program. Let's see how DM2 handles them. Correct Output: DM2 gets a bunch of the basics right. Note heads are clear (though sometimes they overlap and notes must be moved manually). In some rare occasions, note stems do not reach all the way to their beams. Plenty of jaggedness is visible when scores are printed on my 300dpi laser printer. Some symbols overlap each other and cannot be corrected; for example, "8va up" symbols overlap high notes. Dots on dotted notes are sometimes correctly placed, sometimes too high, and sometimes missing (!!), particularly in chords with dotted notes (see the "BUGS" section, below). Beaming: In general, DM2 chooses beam distances and angles well. Unfortunately, some note/rest combinations are impossible to beam with DM2. Chords: DM2 does a decent job, even with chords containing half steps. Ties And Slurs: DM2 can tie/slur notes within a measure, across measures, and across staves. Nice. But they look lousy printed: very jagged. And very small ties are not symmetric, making them look deformed. Creating Your Own Symbols: DM2 provides no facility for this. You can create your own Amiga font full of musical symbols and use it, but DM2 has no user interface for inserting these symbols except by keystroke, forcing the user to memorize which keystrokes correspond to which font symbols. PROGRAM PREFERENCES DM2 can run on many kinds of screens, including custom, Workbench and Public Screens. You can change the Palette and the font. However, if you change the font to something too large, you can't access the rightmost menus because they are pushed offscreen. And the rightmost menu is the "Settings" menu, so you can't change the font back. And the Settings menu has no keyboard equivalents. OOPS!!! You're stuck. Quit the program and restart it. Even with this little "Catch 22" problem, it is great to see a program that lets the user modify the screen type so nicely. Well done. INTERNAL SOUNDS DM2 comes with 32 sampled instrument sounds. I think their quality is reasonable for use as a sketchpad and for quick feedback. I do my real playback with MIDI synthesizers. Since sounds are a matter of taste, I won't say any more on this. MIDI IMPLEMENTATION Instead of using the internal sounds, you can assign different staves to play on different MIDI channels. This worked fine for me. You can also input your music using a MIDI keyboard, on one staff at a time. Note duration is increased the longer you hold down the key: it jumps to eighth, dotted eighth, quarter, etc., at a speed that you may set. Too bad there's no metronome built in, or you might be able to enter your music in real time. DM2 is not a heavy-duty sequencer. It doesn't have sophisticated features like MIDI event filtering, system exclusive handling, etc.: just simple recording and playback. MUSIC PLAYBACK The score can be played back starting either from the beginning, or between two markers (Begin/End Section). This is pretty lame, since there is only one set of markers in a score. I'd rather see an unlimited number, and the ability to name them for easy reference. During playback, there is no way to cause the program to skip repeats, or skip to a second ending. There also appears to be no way to adjust the volumes of the internal instruments relative to one another. I'd rate the playback options as "minimally acceptable." MUSIC PRINTING Printing speed is approximately one page every 5-6 minutes on my 68030 Amiga with an HP Laserjet IIP printer. Some of my complaints about the printing are: o Repeated 16th-notes overlap their note heads. o Flats sometimes overlap the previous note stem. o In a chord with 2 sharps, one of the sharps invariably overlaps the previous note. o Beams are jagged, even on a 300dpi laser printer. o "Begin repeat" signs overlap the first note in the measure. o "8va" signs overlap high or low notes. o Very small ties look like crap. In general, ties and slurs look jagged and sometimes deformed. If you look at the output from 1-2 feet away, it appears close to publication quality. But look closer and you see the jaggies. This is not professional output, but it's good enough to read. AREXX IMPLEMENTATION DM2 has a very rich ARexx implementation with 86 commands, some having many options. I wrote a few scripts, and most things worked as documented. If your script contains an error, DM2 puts up a requestor with the ARexx error message -- THANK YOU for this. ARexx macros may be recorded and played back interactively. Just choose "Record", do a bunch of things in the program, and then stop recording. You have just created a macro that can be played back repeatedly, and then saved in a file if you desire. ARexx macros are executed using a file requestor (choose the script name) or may be assigned to function keys. DM2 also has an ARexx Console (a command-line shell) which lets the user type ARexx commands directly if desired, for experimentation or quick operations. GREAT feature. A few of the ARexx commands are implemented strangely. For example, the "Next Note" command which moves the cursor to the next note will deselect the previous note, if it was selected. This is dumb, since a very obvious operation is to move from note to note, selecting each. I wonder if this behavior is a bug? Another strange thing is that "Goto Measure" does looks like it moves the cursor to the beginning of the measure, but internally it doesn't. If you try to do a "SelectItem" immediately afterwards, it selects the second item in the measure. To go the beginning of a measure, you have to do "Goto Measure" followed by "Previous Note". I have one big complaint about ARexx in DM2, and that is Electronic Arts' attitude about it. The manual repeatedly describes ARexx as "an advanced programming language" which is "recommended for expert computer users" only. Not only that, but "Electronic Arts does not offer technical customer support for ARexx scripting issues." Hey, why not just say that ARexx is poison that will kill you?!? Come on, EA, what's the point in trying to scare away new users from ARexx? I have more complaints about the ARexx documentation in the "DOCUMENTATION" section, below. FILE FORMATS DM2 stores its files by default in CMUS format, a new IFF format which is more powerful than the old SMUS that Deluxe Music Construction Set used. It can also read and write files in SMUS and Standard MIDI File (SMF) format. Realize, however, that not all file formats store the same information. If you don't save in CMUS format, not all of the symbols in your score will be saved. SMF format is great for importing your music into a sequencer, but it won't store beaming, text, etc. It also doesn't notice your repeat signs, which I consider a design flaw: DM2 should give you the option of "expanding" repeated sections by including them multiple times in the SMF. Finally, according to a report I read in comp.sys.amiga.audio, saving in SMUS format has problems with notes with long duration. DOCUMENTATION Documentation consists of a 167-page, spiral bound manual, an 8-page fold-out Amiga Reference Card, and a README file on disk with last-minute information. The manual is suitable for beginners and contains several tutorials that are reasonably good. Experts will occasionally be frustrated with the manual's "beginner" tone. I don't like the presentation of the ARexx information. Pardon me for yelling, but I wish manufacturers would... STOP DOCUMENTING AREXX COMMANDS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER!!! IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE NAME OF THE COMMAND YOU NEED, YOU HAVE TO READ THE WHOLE DAMN SECTION TO FIND IT!!!! PLEASE DOCUMENT AREXX COMMANDS ACCORDING TO THEIR FUNCTION!!! For example, "file commands", "movement commands", "delete commands", "locking and unlocking the GUI commands", etc. If you insist on using alphabetical order, then AT LEAST provide a brief functional grouping of command names in a separate section. This is SO frustrating. In fact, I am so frustrated that I wrote my own functional grouping and uploaded it to Aminet, in the directory /pub/aminet/mus/midi, in the file DMusic2-ARexx.lha. The Reference Card is very handy, except for its coverage of ARexx, which does nothing but scare users away from trying it. LIKES AND DISLIKES * Likes (1) It's easy to use. (2) It adheres to Commodore's User Interface Style Guide. (3) It has a ton of ARexx commands. * Dislikes (1) There is no visual indicator of whether the current score is saved or not. (2) You can't erase text with the Eraser Tool. In fact, you can't erase text boxes at all! You can delete the text in them, but the invisible boxes stay around forever. (3) While multitasking, it's easy to insert extra notes accidentally. Click the Note Tool, flip Deluxe Music's screen to the back, work on a different screen for a while, and then flip back to Deluxe Music. If you activate the screen by clicking in the score window, an unwanted note gets inserted. Boo. Other programs can detect that they are being reactivated and won't treat the first mouseclick as an operation. (In fact, David Joiner's own Music-X program does this.) (4) The program is missing many standard notation features that I mentioned in the body of the review. (5) This is a BIG one. Deluxe Music uses the same Clipboard unit as most programs -- unit 0. This means that if you are multitasking Deluxe Music with your favorite word processor, then cutting/pasting with your word processor deletes or garbages the data that Deluxe Music puts into the clipboard. FRUSTRATING! Possibly this is a bug in Deluxe Music, because writing to the Clipboard with DM2 doesn't garbage other programs' clipped data. (6) Insert some text. Now adjust the staff spacing using the Staff Window. The text stays in the same absolute position, rather than moving to the same relative position in the score. Let the user attach text to symbols so the text moves when the symbol does. (7) If two notes are tied, and you want to tie the second also to a third note, you can't do it directly. You have to remove the first tie, select all 3 notes, and tie them all. (8) "Revert" makes the display jump away from the current location to elsewhere in the score. This is because while the old version is reloading, the scroll bar gets moved around, and then the score jumps to correspond to the new scrollbar location. (9) Why does "Tie Note Up" have a keyboard equivalent but "Tie Note Down" does not? Why doesn't every non-dangerous menu item have a keyboard equivalent? * Suggestions (1) Allow the user to choose which Clipboard unit is used by the program, so it doesn't conflict with other non-music programs. Or if this behavior is a bug, fix it. (2) If you click on the background screen, you have no menu bar at all. While this is natural from a programming standpoint, it can be confusing to the user. Always have some menu active. (3) If you want to make a very high note on a low staff, the program can't distinguish it from a low note on a high staff (due to overlap). There should be a "staff lock" command that forces all input to go to a particular staff. (4) Too often, I have to click on the background before the Note Tool to "clear" the fact that notes are selected. If I don't, then I can't click on any modifiers (to apply to the next note) without applying them to the selected notes. There should be a quick way to do "deselect all" rather than clicking on the background, or even better, the program should "deselect all" (at the user's option) when the Note Tool is clicked (perhaps under certain circumstances...?). (5) I don't like the use of "Exit" in some requesters, such as the one in the "Save As" requestor, which should probably be "Cancel." (6) The GetItemAttr command has no way to discover the name of the current note (A, C, etc.), only the MIDI pitch number. Thus, enharmonic notes (e.g., A-sharp and B-flat) cannot be distinguished. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS The old "Deluxe Music Construction Set" was interesting to play with, but it had severe limitations and does not work reliably under AmigaDOS 2.0 and higher. Dr. T's "Copyist Professional DTP" produces excellent output, but it is primarily a graphics program lacking real knowledge of music. (For example, if you want to insert a measure, you have to move all the later measures by hand to make space. This is pathetic! Can you imagine a word processor forcing you to do this when you insert a word?) DM2 has more musical knowledge, though its printed output is inferior to Copyist's Postscript. Maybe someone will write a new "Copyist Companion" program that will convert from CMUS to Copyist format for printing. The freely distributable MusicTeX or MuTeX also produces great output and is quite flexible, but it requires TeX programming knowledge to use effectively. DM2 is far easier to use. The Macintosh and PC have pro-level programs like Finale, Score, Notator, and several others, but these have never been ported to the Amiga. These programs are light-years beyond anything available for the Amiga. Finale can reportedly be run on the Amiga using the AMax II+ or Emplant Macintosh emulators. BUGS Sigh... Deluxe Music is FULL of bugs. I am really surprised that the program was released in this buggy state. Here is a brief listing of the bugs that I discovered in two weeks of using the program. * Serious Bugs (1) The program produces Enforcer hits. They happen at various times that I cannot predict. One reproducible hit is to open the ARexx Console and type "changeitem pitch -1", which is an illegal command, but NOTHING should produce Enforcer hits. (2) Create a measure with an octave chord in it. Apply a sharp accidental to the lower note. Save the score and close it. Re-load the score, and both notes now have sharps on them. (This is musically incorrect -- accidentals do not automatically apply to other notes with the same name, e.g., an octave away.) [This bug was discovered by someone else on USENET.] (3) Sometimes, quitting the program causes a recoverable alert (yellow) to be displayed, saying "Not enough memory for this operation." Not enough memory to QUIT?!?!? Huh?? (4) After pasting from the clipboard, the score cursor does not appear in any consistent place. Sometimes it's in the next measure of the same staff. Sometimes it's in the same measure of the next staff. Sometimes it's in the middle of a measure. And so on. So quick, consistent, repeated pasting is not possible. * Other Bugs (5) Inserting a rest sometimes causes a note to be played. (6) Inserting a note sometimes causes the wrong note -- an octave off -- to be played. (7) Use the "Up Octave" menu item to raise notes in your topmost staff so high that they go beyond the staff separation markers. Now lower the notes. Bogus ledger lines are left in the staff above. (8) Click the depth gadget on the Tools Window. Then click the Note Tool. The cursor should change into a note head, but it doesn't. (9) Slurs don't move upward during an "Up Octave" operation. If you flip the note stems twice, the problem is corrected. (10) Sometimes when dragging a note, the wrong pitch will sound. For example, in the key of A-flat major, drag an E-flat up a half step. An F-flat sounds, but the actual note is F. (11) Once when I clicked on the close gadget of the Tool Window, the mouse pointer disappeared. It came back when I clicked the right mouse button. (12) The "8va up" and "8va down" symbols cannot be moved up and down; therefore, they overlap very high and low notes, respectively. This is true both on the printout and on screen. (13) Very high notes overlap with instrument names. (14) Insert a very low note as the first note of the last measure in the score. This forces the screen to scroll. Under some circumstances, if you hold down the mouse button too long, the scrolling causes the note to be inserted much too low. This is intermittent, but I can usually reproduce it after a few minutes of trying. (15) Open a new text box. Then change font to a smaller size. The box stays big (to accommodate the large font), and the text in the new font sometimes comes out too large. This is intermittent. (16) Scrolling the score vertically sometimes causes graphics glitches. The main one is that a portion of the staff gets drawn one pixel too high, so the straight lines are disconnected at a point. (17) It is not possible to apply an "8va up" to a single note. Try it, and no "8va" symbol appears. (18) Display the Piano Keyboard Window and click on the "Enter Notes In Score" gadget so a checkmark appears. Now print your score. While printing is in progress, click on the gadget again and the checkmark disappears. However, the program still thinks that you are in "enter notes in score" mode, even though the gadget is unchecked. (19) Create a half-step chord -- adjacent E and F at the bottom of a staff with a treble clef -- made of dotted notes. The dot for the E is missing. For other note combinations, the upper note has two dots instead of one. (20) Multiple menu selection doesn't always work. (Holding down the right mouse button and clicking several menu items with the left button.) I could not reproduce this problem later. (21) I was able to drag a text box so far to the left of the score window that the drag gadget was left out of the window bounds (that is, I could not see it). Thus, I was not able to drag the box any more since the gadget was out of sight. I could not reproduce this bug. Maybe I was clueless and forgot about the horizontal scroll bars. (22) The "8va up" modifier is ignored when you select a note to hear its pitch. The pitch that is played is the un-raised pitch. (Similarly for "8va down".) (23) In a measure with some beamed notes, spend a lot of time adjusting the beams manually so they look just the way you like. Then add a new note to the measure. All the beams jump back to their original positions!!! (24) When you do a "Down Octave" operation on beamed notes, the note stems grow downward, but the beam stays in the same place. So you get notes with ridiculously long beams. If you flip the note stems twice, the stems go back to normal. (25) Try to beam a triplet consisting of an 8th note and a 16th note which are tied together. The beam appears normally. Click elsewhere in the score. The beam disappears! This is intermittent. (26) Halting (canceling) a print job leaves my printer's "job in progress" light turned on. I don't know if the program or the printer is at fault, but my other programs don't cause this to happen. (27) Saving a score as a Standard MIDI File removes all of the repeat signs. It also loses some time signature changes. (28) Clicking on the Play Section control sometimes produces a burst of audio noise instead of starting playback. Clicking a second time starts playback. (29) The empty measure at the end of the score is impossible to get rid of permanently. Delete it, save the score and reload it, and the empty measure is back. (30) Insert two instrument changes in the same staff. Now insert notes after the second instrument change. The notes you hear during insertion use the first instrument sound. (31) The ARexx sequence of LockGUI followed by UnlockGUI leaves an extra score cursor (vertical bar) on the screen. UpdateDisplay doesn't remove it. Resizing the score window does. (32) Rests are considered of NOTE type when using GetItemAttr. They have Note.Pitch = 0. However, 0 is a legitimate MIDI note pitch, so this is a conflict. * Unintended Behavior (probably) (1) The "undo" command clears all of the modifiers (sharps, triplets, etc.) in the Tool Window. (2) Locate a note in your score that is a natural in the key signature (that is, its scale degree does not have a sharp or flat applied). Use the mouse to drag the note to a sharped/flatted scale degree. This turns on the sharp/flat in the Tool Window, and it stays on! Thus, the next notes you enter will have this sharp/flat applied to them. (3) Apply an "8va up" to a group of notes. Then use the Score Setup Window to increase the score width. The notes spread out, but the "8va up" symbol doesn't line up with the notes any more. Unfortunately, this bug is intermittent. (4) Click the Play Section gadget. Then click the Stop gadget. Then click the Stop gadget again, so the score should start playing from where it left off. It does (sometimes), but now the Play (instead of Play Section) gadget is turned on. I think that "continue from where you left off" should mean that the same play mode should be used. VENDOR SUPPORT DM2 was supposed to ship by April 1993, according to advertisements by Electronic Arts, but it didn't appear until late September. Such delays reflect badly on the vendor, in my opinion. I have had no reason to contact the vendor, but I will be sending them a long bug report. :-( WARRANTY [UPDATE: This section was updated on Oct 23, 1993.] There is a 14-day unconditional guarantee. If you are not satisfied with the product, return it within 14 days of purchase for a refund. After 14 days, media is guaranteed for 90 days. After 90 days, it costs $7.50 (US) for each replacement disk. CONCLUSIONS Page 32 of the manual states that "DeluxeMusic gives you complete flexibility in the way you format your musical scores." Unfortunately, this statement is too optimistic. The fact that you cannot raise "8va" symbols and instrument names so they don't obscure your notes is a simple counterexample, and there are dozens more. The sheer number of bugs in this program is very disappointing. Since many of them are intermittent bugs, I fear that they will be hard for the author to track down. I really hope they get fixed though, and soon. Deluxe Music 2.0 is not a professional level notation program. But pro-level programs run $250 or more on other computers. Is Deluxe Music 2.0 worth the price? Yes. You can get some work done with it, and it's rather fun, except for the annoying bugs. I give this program 2.5 out of 5 stars in its current state. It fills a much-needed gap in Amiga software, but not enough to satisfy me. I hope that Electronic Arts will give this program a serious update, or at least a bug fix very soon. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1993 by Daniel J. Barrett. This article may be freely distributed as long as it is distributed in its entirety. It may not be included in any commercial publication without the written permission of the author. Dan //////////////////////////////////////\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ | Dan Barrett -- Dept of Computer Science, Lederle Graduate Research Center | | University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003 -- barrett@cs.umass.edu | \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\///////////////////////////////////// --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews