whites@unvax.union.edu (Shayne White) (03/06/91)
Today in our school art department was a demonstration of midi and what it can do using Macs. The guy from Apple was really cool about the whole thing. I expected to hear a lot of BS and not a lot of results, but I was mistaken. The guy who did the demonstration didn't give a hard-edged sales pitch for the Mac which was nice. He started by showing off the setup....a harddrive, a Mac SE, a midi interface, a cd-rom player, a Roland C 64 sythn box and a Roland keyboard controller. I was very impressed w/ the sounds of the C 64. Anyway, the first program was Musica Practica or something like that. It taught music theory and was very complete. Is there a similar program for our beloved Amiga? Next was Master Tracks sequencer by Passport (I think I got the name right, I didn't take notes). This was also very impressive as far as the power goes, but I found the screen updates sometimes excruciatingly slow. The demo guy attributed this to being the 'slowest computer we make', the SE. Ok. Most people can live with that I guess. He also discussed recording digital audio. He said the newest Macs have built in sampling software and a jack for a mic. He also said that a lot of pro studio use the Mac to record CD sound to the harddrive. I think he said about 1 minute of CD quality digital sound is 20 megs, 10 megs for mono. For about $1000, mac users can get a digital card that gives them 4 digital tracks to record on. He said you could send this to a disc company and have them make your CD for about $90. Impressive. He was really trying to persuade the music teachers that computers won't replace real musicians. Scoring software was also shown. I haven't seen Dr. T's stuff, but the mac stuff was pretty good. Even the staunchest 'old-school' music professors were impressed. Aside from the music stuff, I asked the guy about the release of system 7.0 He said June of this year. I asked about it being pre-emptive multi-tasking. Nope. "Co-operative multi-tasking". What is this?! He said that you can actually do things in the background, like calculate a spreadsheet, etc. Anyone care to comment on this? He also said this can be done under the current Mac OS. True? I'm not sure. I asked him what he thought of the Amiga, just to see his response. He said he liked the hardware, but the software was not up to par. For the most part, I had to agree. The mac stuff was really good. The clipboard support is nice too. He said that the Unix stuff had better take off or Commodore is in a lot of trouble....... Is Commodore doing that badly? I'm pretty optimistic about things with the Amiga. 2.0 seems to be pretty well recieved. I realize an Apple employee isn't going to rave about the Amiga, but.... Also, we discussed the MIDI manager. He said it was similar to a MIDI pipe? What does anyone know about this? I hear Commodore or Dr. T's is working on something similar for the Amiga. There was no mention of Multi-Media really. I thought it interesting that Apple isn't pushing music stuff because others are selling it for them. I guess this makes sense. It seems to be sort of the standard in the music industry. Am I wrong in saying this? I would be interested in hearing some feedback about this stuff..... -Shayne White (92_whites@unvax.union.edu)