Music Composer

ACE (Advanced Computer Entertainment)

Mark Jenkins

OLIVER'S MUSIC BOX/MUSIC COMPOSER Cosmic Pop, PO Box 475, London, E4 9UD Oliver's Music Box Spectrum 128 £9.99 Music Composer Spectrum 128 £11.99 Both these packages are intended to cope with 'music inputs and processing' and have a few features which their creators claim are unique. Both use conventional music staves but can cope with tied notes (notes joined together with a line which indicates that their values are to be added together) even if they cross bar-lines. The Spectrum 128 can't be connected to a printer while it's in 128K operating mode, so there is no printing facility on the Music Composer, but otherwise the two packages are pretty similar. Music Composer does allow you to use the Spectrum's noise generator which is not normally accessible from 128K BASIC, and thus lets you create drum sounds as well as musical notes, the nature of the drum sound depends on the musical pitch and envelope you choose, and the tied notes are another effect inaccessible from the Spectrum's sound chip. Oliver's Music is a simpler version of the same package for a 48K machine. The difference is that it allows you to print out your music, entering notes from the keyboard in more or less the same way. Whether printing is of any interest to you depends on what applications you'll find for your music. In the Final Check mode. Music Box fills up the empty staves a note at a time, which is a good way of spotting mistakes in your programming. 5600 note capacity and 15 demo tunes make this one pretty good value for money too.