MIDI Composition Tools
By Walt Reid
In response to the questions about music writing software I have the following to offer. Use it if you feel it is useful
I started with professional composer (running on a Mac). Found it lacking in several areas of flexibility. I had the opportunity to upgrade (for a fee) to Mark of the Unicorn's Composer's Mosaic. It took them three subsiquent upgrades (free) to get the bugs out. However, it seems to work well when used with a midi instrument for input and test output. If you have a lot of midi instruments, you can "patch" each voice as needed to other midi channels for a midi ensemble. I do not think it useful as a sequencer--although it will work somewhat like one. I purchased my software only for the notation abilities. And that was before I had a Midi instrument. Composer's Mosaic Prints nice Postscript music and I assume truetype (using Adobe Type Manager). I am enjoying the way it works but it has some limitations:
No Midi inport utility (as far as I can tell) to allow you to take a midi file from elsewhere and notate it. It will accept midi from an instrument.
Copy protection-yuk! You have to set the folder to NOT be compressed if you use disk doubler. Its not too bad, just bad enough to be an occasional problem.
It does cost a large (for me its large) chunk of money to purchase.
All of the above is only my opinion. Use it with caution.
Walt
waltreid@aol.com
"What would the world be like without Hypothetical Questions?" |
(Message sent Sun 22 Oct 1995, 03:10:50 GMT, from time zone GMT-0400.) |
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