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start to listen to weird electronic sounds, watch useless programs on outdated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
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