The first kind, have almost disappeared from Amiga scenery, due to the lack of interest that Amiga users demonstrated for their functions. An exception is rapresented by "Deluxe Music", a great program oriented mostly to Amiga graphic, instead of its sound capabilities. Its popularity is so wide that not so long ago has been released a new version: "Deluxe Music 2.0" that, in my hones opinion, is to be considered one of the betetr programs for Amiga. This program offers a peculiar feature of musical programs expecially oriented to professionists: paper output. "Deluxe Music" has been created expecially to give to the user professional level printings, without suffering in the comparison with other more glanced platforms. This package, anyway, is a good tools also in sound manipulation, deriving by the capability of driving MIDI devices. It is a real DTP musical progra.
Second kind of programs we exposed has become very popular among the so called 'power-users', but surely these programs are too complex for normal user, one coming from classical music studies based upon the score, may find himself completely upset, facing a program that turns completely upside-down the philosophy of thinking to music. We can boldly say taht this kind of software was born on the never forgotten C64, to reach its maximum on Amiga.
Talking about sequencers, at the end, we are enetering professional area. These programs require the use of devices that not everybody can buy, even if we have to say that the great MIDI expansion applying in these years has permitted to producers to cut prices giving to a large area of "medium" Amiga users the opportunity of enjoyining the powerful features offered by these instruments.
During these articles, we'll do an excursus on these three philosophies of seeing music on Amiga computers, starting with the program that, in my opinion, better represents our computer power and computer music.
"OctaMED", I think, rappresents the only example of musical software on our platform that joins in one single program the features of the three programs we talked about: not only it is intuitive and easy to use even for someone that doesn't know any Tracker, but allows to create and modify in a lot of ways any kind of musical piece, and also to use MIDI devices, with all the unlimited uses that this standard can offer. That's why Amiga papers defined it the best music program, and a vast part of musics inside games, demos and commercial programs is created with this wondeful program. With the latest versions of this program, it has evolved very much from its poor beginning, because its MIDI handling grew a lot and now you can edit the usal 16 channels, so you can store and play complete songs using MIDI, just like with a sequencer.
Written by a Finnish, if you have never head about him, he is called Teijo Kinnunen, "OctaMED" was born seven years ago with the name of "MED" (Music Editor), and was a freeware product, essentially to exhaust musical need of Kinnunen brothers that, at that time, were music and Amiga fanatics, they thought to create a program with that flexibility that no program else had. They told they'd had cretated also a LP working on this program. The incredible success obtained pushed the author to create new versions always better and more powerful and to sell it as a shareware product first, and then as a full commercial program.
Features of this program are so great and peculiars, due to the vast number of options avaible, some of them are easy to be used also by novice, others are far more complex, giving to this software the right approach to both professionals and occasional users, always giving them very good results.
For this trip inside "OctaMED" we'll refer to latest version of the commercial product, starting from V5.0+, expecially studying V6.0. Starting from this version, infact, the program under went a complete graphic restyling and added to the name of Kinnunen also the one of Ray Burt-Frost, while with the last version distributed this year, the program changed its name: package changed its name, taking the name of "OctaMED SoundStudio v1", and it is still distributed by "RBF Software".
That's all for now. We'll continue in the next issue, with a deeper look inside "OctaMED" features. See you soon!