[rec.music.synth] A Review of Bars & Pipes

nsw@cbnewsm.ATT.COM (Neil Weinstock) (01/06/90)

In article <10782@cadnetix.COM> larry@cadnetix.COM (Larry Peterson) writes:
>A Review of Bars & Pipes
[ ... ]

I have the Bars and Pipes demo, and find a couple of things objectionable
(BTW, I use Music-X, which is good though certainly far from perfect).  I 
would be interested in hearing from an owner of the package if these are 
really problems or not.

	1) No support for sysex yet.  I *need* sysex to do certain varieties
	   of patch changes on my M1R.

	2) As far as I could tell, each "track" could only hole MIDI data 
	   associated with one MIDI channel.  I'd like to hear I'm wrong about
	   this one.  I find it to be an unacceptable restriction.  Do the
	   top PC and Mac (ok, and Atari) packages typically work this way?
	   In Music-X, I can put absolutely anything in a sequence.  I depend
	   on that quite a bit.

	3) I was told by the Blue Ribbon Bakery (love that name, BTW) folks that
	   when you construct an ABA format (or however you'd phrase it) that,
	   for instance, the "A" data is *copied* to produce the second repeat.
	   The memory-consuming aspects of that worry me.

	4) I am not crazy about the "appearance" of the package.  It looks very
	   carnival-like to me.  Certainly, that's purely a matter of personal
	   taste.

I guess that #'s 1 and 2 are really the killers for me right now.  I certainly
do give them credit for coming out with a truly *interesting* program.

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