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MusicMon 2.1 SID

The Atari virus strikes again, infecting heroes from the "golden age". Guys  who
seemed to  be completely  cured since  a decade,  living a  pretty normal  life,
having jobs  and families  suddenly begin  to show  some strange behaviour. They
start to listen to weird  electronic sounds, watch useless programs  on outdated
computers  and even  more strange,  start coding  again on  those old  machines.
Source codes that have been hibernating for ages on some dusty disks or decaying
harddisks are improved  and compiled or  assembled again and  again.  This  time
Dark Angel aka  Frank Lautenbach fell  prey to the  virus and it  seems there is
still life in the old dog. 

MusicMon  2.0 SID was already a cool release  but 2.1 seriously kicks some butt.
It comes  with lots  of example  songs and  astonishingly with  a data disk that
contains lots  of instruments and samples. I bet all  chip musicians  will  love
this release.   The feature-list   of this   editor is   quite impressive  but I
guess  gem  is going   to  declass all  other  sound editors  when   he releases
maxYMizer in  a few  weeks. But   now let's  have a  close look  at  the news in
MusicMon 2.1:

* By making it start from ST medium resolution as well as from low resolution it
  got a  nice usability improvement.  Now there is no need to switch the  screen
  resolution manually anymore.

* Entering of song- and soundname can now be canceled by 'ESC' key (small  issue
  but it was  just nasty  when accidentally klicking  into  the sound-/song-name
  field with left instead of right mouse-key)

* Pasting tracks was also heavily improved; finally you have an overlay/underlay
paste Feature (SHIFT + 'U' / 'O').

* Sync-Buzzers were included.

* Improved SID syncing.

* Range of PMD Hardwave Depth extended to 63 (previously 15).

*  Pitch-Bend can  now be  applied also  to hardwave  (very important  for sync-
   buzzers but also useful for normal buzzers)

* SMC-free replay routine  with free configurable timer  use which is in  fact a
  pretty cool feature. The removal of self modifying code allows the replayer to
  work also on machines with caches.

* Commandline parameters are now supported, which means you can install MM2.1 as
  an application and  just doubleclick on SNG-files to load  them as well as the
  editor.  Make sure you set the default  directory to the  application and pass
  the full pathname.

* Last not  least, beside all  the new features  MM2.1S is completely  backwards
compatible to all previous versions.

Dark Angel summarizes the features as follows in his scrolltext:

The hardwave  menu offers  a new  sync alternative  activated by  the new purple
button 'S. 3'. Once activated it applies periodically sync on hardwave providing
the sync buzzer effect. The frequency of the sync generator behaves in the  same
way as the SID square generator does  (but is driven one octave lower). Same  as
for SID generator, only Arpeggio affects the generator frequency, but Pitch Bend
or PMD do not. Sync Buzzer feature cannot be combined with SID so activating 'S.
3' automatically switches off SID and vice versa.

Most important on Sync-Buzzer sounds  is smart modulation of hardwave  frequency
as you surely know already. So now, the pitch bend generator can also be applied
to the hardwave  by the new  button 'A.P.B.' (Apply  Pitch Bend). The  Frequency
offset of pitch-bend  is divided by  16 to achieve  a match with  the PSG square
frequency (so slides of normal buzzer sounds sound also correctly). That  means,
a speed of 16 corresponds to a continuous frequency slide each 1/50 s, 1/100  s,
1/200 s. Beyond that, the PMD Depth  for Hardwave has been extended to 63  which
provides also additional possibilities.

Using MusicMon 2.1 is pretty easy; please note that there is a helppage included
which can be displayed by pressing "Help" :). If you are asking how to exit  the
program,  well  try Shift + Shift + Ctrl + Q.  If you are not familiar  with the
creation of instruments, don't bother and use the data disk or the included demo
tracks to use the contained instruments. It will make it quite easy to start...

Cyclone / X-Troll for Alive, 2005-02-06

Alive 9