*********************************** AM/FM ***********************************     OCTAMED PROFESSIONAL V3.00 REVIEW    OctaMED Professional v3.00 Copyright : Amiganuts United Price : £22.50 Manual : £ 8.50 Upgrade from v2 : £12.50 Yep. MED has been upgraded again. Or rather, its 8-channel big brother has. Programmer Teijo Kinnunen has put yet another few thousand hours into this music editor program that has received superb reviews before, but for some reason has never got as widely used as Noisetracker or Protracker. Why, is hard to say - probably just because Noisetracker was there first, as a more or less direct upgrade to Soundtracker (now we're talking ancient history, in the time reckoning of the Amiga!) What are you paying for? As mentioned above, the price for OctaMED Professional v3.00 is £22.50. Ok, so it's not a PD-price exactly, but this product is absolutely worth the price. Really! Those who bought OctaMED v2 from Amiganuts United are offered an upgrade to v3.00 by sending their original white disk with the red Amiganuts logo on in, along with £12.50. Sending another copy of the disk will of course not do any good, and the offer does not apply to those who upgraded from v1 to v2 - only those who actually bought version 2. The reason that the manual is sold separately, for £8.50, is that all the documentation you need is supplied on the OctaMED disk - so you don't really need the manual. But if you want the manual printed in a booklet format that's easy to find your way around etc. you can pay £8.50 extra for this. You might perhaps want to print out the documentation yourself, if you're on a low budget, but if you've got the money, why not? Personally I think the price for the manual was a bit stiff - it's not that swell looking. It's not even printed with a laser printer, or so it looks anyway. If you're a newcomer to MED or OctaMED though, getting the printed manual would be a good idea, since it's much easier to look up specific information in. Generally This program is so massive now, that I don't think I can handle writing a full description of all the features. In short, OctaMED Professional 3.00 is a tracker-style music editor that handles up to 8 channels with Amiga-sound, and up to 16 channels with MIDI-instruments. The amiga-instruments can be both samples and synthetics. The program can hold several songs in memory at once, and they may share some of the same instruments if you wish. That was probably OctaMED described in shortest and quickest possible way. What's new then? New features and improvements from v2 to v3 are: - Much better file screen and file requester - New and better layout on the whole program. More Kick 2.0-like appearance. - New module format which is easier to handle for programmers - Lots of improvements on the MIDI panel and MIDI options - HQ-mode that improves the sound quality when playing 8 channels - Information on screen about available memory - Possible to use BPM (Beats per minute) timing in 4-channel mode - The instrument panel is improved. Finetune option added. - Jumping fellow removed [Ed: Probably due to my own plea to Teijo to remove this silly option. Thanks Teijo!] - Mousebutton can set cursor position instead of just turning on/off tracks. - Note Echo function automatically adds echo-effect in tracks. - Some general improvements in the synthsound editor. - Freehand editing in the sample editor. Great for short samples. - Some small improvements in the SampleList editor. - Many new effect-commands recognized, most of them compatible with Protracker. (More on that below) - Some new keyboard shortcuts Many new effect commands regognized 5 (slide & fade) 6 (vibrato & fade) 7 (tremolo) 10 (send MIDI message) 11 (fine-slide pitch up) 12 ( " " " down) 14 (Protracker-compatible vibrato) 15 (Set finetune) 16 (loop) 18 (cut note) 19 (Sample start offset) 1A (fine-slide volume up) 1B ( " " " down) 1C (Change MIDI preset) 1D (Jump to next playseq block) 1E (Delay line) 1F (Note delay and retrigger) If you're familiar with both OctaMED and Protracker already, you will see that OctaMED now offers all the effect commands that Protracker does. And more too. New MIDI Panel The MIDI panel in v3.00 is probably the most significant improvement. OctaMED can now be used as a full-worthy MIDI sequencer, although perhaps best suited for step-time recording and tapping in MIDI notes - not all that good for those who prefer to actually play the various parts on a keyboard and then polish them in the sequencer. Still, the MIDI functions in OctaMED Professional now surpasses by far everything else I've ever seen in a tracker-style editor. New and easy-to-handle file format Anyway, ever since MED and the 8-channel version OctaMED came out in versions 2.00, it's been widely agreed that OctaMED is the music program for the Amiga - even compared to full-price packages (many of which has proved to be pathetic, but that's another story). I think a lot of people just sticked with Protracker (I admit I did it myself) because they knew it inside and out, so they could handle it quickly and easily. But more important, the MED/OCtaMED file format was said to be a real pain in the bellybutton to use in demos and games. I'm not a programmer myself, but I've seen repeatedly on BBS's and networks that programmers have expressed their frustration over the OctaMED play routines and file structure. Teijo has probably picked up this himself, because he's introduced a completely new module file structure, which he claims to be really easy to use. On the new OctaMED Pro disk is a text file describing the new module file format in detail, it looks perfectly clear to me (even though I'm not even a programmer), so I think this problem has been overcome! New OctaMED player The new OctaMED player is a small stand-alone program that will happily play anything created with OctaMED, and it will also load and play MED-songs or -modules that have been packed with PowerPacker. Unlike OctaMED itself, the player is Public Domain. I'm afraid I have to write though, that the new OctaMEDPlayer have hung twice when I tried to use the file requestor. Totally unacceptable. Conclusion OctaMED Professional v3.00 is the best music editor for the Amiga. There's no doubt about it. Number two is Protracker. After that, comes the rest of them - far, far behind. The only reason NOT to start using OctaMED now, would simply be that you're used to using something else, and you don't want to go through the hassle of learning some new keyboard shortcuts and some new effect commands. OctaMED Professional v3.00, and its documentation is NOT Public Domain. It is a commercial product, copyrighted by Amiganuts United. It is available from: Amiganuts United 169,Dale Valley Road, Hollybrook, Southampton. SO1 6QX. England. *********************************** AM/FM ***********************************