Review of Opcode Musicshop 2.02Review by Bill MoalOpcode Musicshop 2.02 Windows requirements Would you like to improve your ear and further enjoy listening to music? Are you a musician who would like to practice with a band anytime you want? Do you like composing music? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you may want to consider trying a sequencer program. In this review we'll take a look at Musicshop 2.02 by Opcode. A sequencer is much like a word processing program. It records data that can be played back, edited, or printed in musical notation. The files it plays are called MIDI files, and use the extension ".mid". You can buy files at computer and music stores, or you can download free amateur sequences from the net. Two terms that I will use in this article are tracks and channels. A track is where musical data are recorded. A channel directs the data to the proper instrument of the sound card or synthesizer. For instance, if channel 1 is reserved for bass guitar, then the track that has bass guitar music on it will be sent down channel 1. If channel 2 leads to drums, then the track with drum music on it is sent down channel 2. If your sound card can receive 16 channels, it can play up to 16 parts at once. I'll start this review on a negative note. Since all computers are not created equally, I can't say for sure whether you'll have this problem, but when the sequencer program crashed, it automatically rebooted my computer. This means any other programs that were open would be shut down automatically without giving me a chance to save the data. Another thing I don't like about this program is a program that comes with it. It's called the Open Music System, or OMS. OMS is designed to decide whether or not the musical data goes to your sound card, or a synthesizer you have hooked up to your computer. It's meant to work with any OMS compatible programs, not just Musicshop. Its strength is that it can handle a lot of synthesizers at once. Its weakness is that it is very difficult to understand. I've used other sequencer programs where the OMS functions are built into the sequencer program, and they didn't take too long to figure out. With OMS it took several hours for me to get a sound out of it. It took several evenings before I could get the right sounds out of it. Although there are a lot of people who would have better success, I recommend not using Musicshop just to avoid the aggravation of using OMS. In terms of music appreciation, Musicshop is at best mediocre You can mute and solo different instruments allowing you to hear parts of a song you may not have otherwise noticed. Another feature is that you can display on screen or print out music notation, which is a good feature for those who read music. For those who don't read music there is the piano roll. It is a column of piano keys with the letter name of the note on the displayed on the proper piano key. Next to the piano, there is a grid where notes are marked on rows corresponding to the keys on the piano. The timing of the notes is displayed in columns. Both the piano roll screen and the music notation screen move as the song is played back so you can follow the notes being played both visually and aurally. These features are great, but they are available in just about any other sequencer. A great feature that is also available in most other sequencers, but is missing from Musicshop, is the event edit window. The event edit window is a text-based editing system, which allows you to see with precise numbers the various information that is being processed as the song is played. It shows the notes, volume settings, and a variety of other settings that help with detailed analysis. One of the handiest things it shows is the exact timing of the instruments being played. In standard music notation, whether the notes are played a little before or after beat is not shown. When performing, musicians will usually either push or drag the beat to make the music more expressive. Having an exact visual cue may help develop the ear to hear nuances such as timing and tempo changes. If you just want use this for music appreciation, this isn't a bad program, but without the event editor it is not a great program. But how about playing along to other songs? The features I mentioned above are also good for practicing. To learn your part you look at the piano roll or music notation. You can then press the solo button and hear just part you want to play. Then you can play the entire song with all the instruments, and mute the track with the part you want to play on your own instrument. Then while rest of the band is playing, you can supply the missing music. If your instrument is midi compatible, you can also record your performance, and play it back to see how well your playing fits in. Once again I have to cite the absence of the event editor. If you decide to record your playing to see and hear how well you fit in, the exactness of the event editor is very important. I don't think this program is very good for practicing. For composing music Musicshop has some very nice features. The best is that you can take its 16 channel 32 track arrangement and call it arrangement A. Take another 16 channel 32 track arrangement and call it B. You can do this all the way up to Z, and have all the parts play back at the same time, which probably means you won't run out of tracks. Another nice feature that it has called pencil draw. It takes controller values, such as volume, let you shape them in curves or any shape you want. Its very nice for volume swells, or fadeouts. An important feature that it is missing are the ability to soft-quantize. The word quantize means the program adjusts the timing of a musical performance. Hard-quantize can lock the notes exactly on the beat. Musicshop has this feature, but it makes the music sound stiff and robotic. Soft-quantize can adjust the music by percentage, letting the notes fall either a little ahead or behind the beat. Soft-quantize can make the music sound more human and more expressive. Even when I first began using sequencers seven years ago I used this feature. Why Musicshop doesn't have soft-quantize I can't understand. Once again I must also cite the absence of the event editor. As well being good for musical analysis, as the name implies, it is also good for editing. If you have a performance that is almost, but not quite perfect, you can go into the event editor and type in the appropriate values. You can with Musicshop edit the music graphically, but to do that you need to use the mouse. I find some things easier to edit with the mouse and some things easier to edit with the keyboard. Most other programs I've used allow for both graphic editing with mouse and event editing with the keyboard. I find the two missing features much more important then the unlimited tracks, so I don't think I'll think I'll use it for composing. If you been reading the review this far, you may have gathered that I don't like this program. Once I turn in this review, I will happily delete the program from my files. Most of the features it offers are available on cheaper more user-friendly sequencing programs. The few high quality features that it does have do not balance out the features it lacks. If you have any questions about this review, you can e-mail me at billmoal@prado.com . If you wish to find out more about sequencing software, and other things relating to computers and music, a great place to start is Harmony Central at www.harmony-central.com/ .
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