Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: tron@westlink.fipnet.fi (Pasi Kovanen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: Bars and Pipes Professional version 2.0 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.audio Date: 25 Feb 1994 21:38:37 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 307 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2klr4t$nm4@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: tron@westlink.fipnet.fi (Pasi Kovanen) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: audio, music, MIDI, sequencer, commercial PRODUCT NAME Bars and Pipes Professional version 2.0 ("BPPro") (18 February 93) BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bars and Pipes Professional is one of the Amiga's most advanced MIDI sequencing programs. The newest version has added many multimedia capabilities. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: The Blue Ribbon Soundworks Ltd. Address: 1605 Chantilly Drive Suite 200 Atlanta, Georgia 30324 USA Telephone: (404) 315-0212 Telefax: (404) 315-0213 LIST PRICE 2295 FIM, approximately $350 (US). The US street price is a bit above $200, I think. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE At least 1 meg of RAM (2 meg recommended). For MIDI usage, a synthesizer with MIDI is necessary. For multimedia applications, it's not necessary. Works with accelerated Amigas. SOFTWARE None. COPY PROTECTION BPPro is serialized: when installed for the first time, a registration number must be typed in. The number is printed on the disk label. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING Amiga 1200: 2 MB of Chip RAM AGA chipset Kickstart 3.0 Workbench 3.0 240 MB Maxtor hard disk GVP JAWS A1230: 68030/40 68882/40 4 MB of Fast RAM, A MIDI interface Korg M1 synthesizer INSTALLATION Installation is done with Blue Ribbon's installing software. I'd prefer the Commodore Installer. INTRODUCTION I will concentrate on the sequencing capabilities, because I'm not so interested in building my own multimedia presentations. BPPro is a sequencer with thousands of functions and many original ideas. It's not as conventional as Dr. T's Keyboard Controlled Sequencer (KCS) and is not a "tracker" program. REVIEW A couple of years ago, I had a quick look at the original Bars and Pipes Pro. It looked fine and powerful, but without the manual it was really difficult to use (yes, it was a pirate version, I confess). I used OctaMED with my M1 and it was nice to use, though music created with OctaMED sounds like... well, music created with OctaMED. Some friends recommended that I get Dr. T's KCS. I gave it a chance, but everything had to be done with numbers. "I had enough of mathematics in High School" (finally over!) I thought and deleted KCS from my hard drive. A few months ago, I decided to buy BPPro II. It came and I had a quick look at it. It looked even more fine and powerful, but without reading the manual it was really difficult to use. So I read the manual, and the program started opening to me. Basically, BPPro works just like any other sequencer. One has an unlimited amount of tracks to record on. Any track can use any MIDI channel. But that's as conventional as BPPro gets BPPro. Every track has its own pipeline (I wonder how they invented the program's name :-)) with a "valve". The valve controls the musical flow. The pipe can be connected to three parts: the MIDI-in part, the note part, and the MIDI-out part. When you record music, the notes go through the MIDI-in part and get to the note part. When BPPro plays the notes, the go through the MIDI-out part. Surprising, eh? Why all these parts? The most powerful little things in BPPro are called Tools. Tools are modules, separate from BPPro, that are used for tasks like transposing, quantization, echoing, and even unquantization! There are dozens of tools in the program, and I have only tried a few of them. If one puts a tool just before the note part of the pipe, every note recorded will be processed with that tool. But if one places the tool in the MIDI-out part, the notes will be recorded unchanged and then processed every time they go to MIDI-out. One can place many tools into every pipeline, and thus it's very easy to try different quantizations and transpositions. There can be dozens of windows open, and one can change parameters for tools in real-time while the song plays. Accessories are a bit like tools, but they cannot be placed on the pipeline. Accessories are also modules and control BPPro's extensive ARexx functions, Standard MIDI File importing and exporting, and system exclusive recording, among other things. They are like programs that open on BPPro's screen. Tools and Accessories have fun names and icons. "Toasty" controls the Toaster, "SMoose" loads and saves SMUS songs and has a picture of a pink moose(!!), "ANIMal" plays animations, "G-LOCKenspiel" controls the GVP G-Lock genlock, and so on. There are many ways to edit the recorded piece of music. When one double-clicks on the track, an editing window opens. Here one can select classical notation (which can be printed), hybrid (which shows notes as lines), piano-roll, guitar tablature (for guitar freaks) or list editing. I find hybrid the easiest way for editing the notes. One edits the music with a wand, hand, and other editing tools (these are not the Tools explained above). With the hand, one grabs notes and drags them to new positions. The wand alters lengths. Rubber deletes notes, and Pen creates new ones. Hard parts of a song can be recorded by step editing. Also, pattern editing facilities exist but I haven't had experience with them yet. When I looked at them for the first time, the program crashed (I got scared, you know). Editing the tempo is very easy. You draw a tempo line onto the tempo map with the mouse. You can easily create linear, sudden, or exponential tempo changes. My only complaint is that I would like to have the tempo line relative to the selected "main" tempo; i.e., if I changed the main tempo from 125 BPM to 120 BPM, the tempo line also should drop by 5 BPM. Also, mixing is easy. The Mix Maestro window has sliders and knobs for every channel in the song, and movements of these gadgets can be recorded in real time. The knob usually controls panning (MIDI controller number 10) but you can change it to control something else. (Panning doesn't work with the Korg M1, by the way.). The slider works like the volume slider in a mixing board and usually affects MIDI volume (MIDI controller number 7). Song Construction is a nice window. Here you can break your song into named sections (A, B, C, etc.) and put the sections in any order you wish. The multimedia support is extensive with full SMPTE support. It also has support for Scala, the Video Toaster, Sunrise AD516 card, and its own slide show program. The SMPTE tracks can be set to real-time mode. Real-time tracks do not react to tempo changes. Every track can have its own time signature. This can create really exciting results, I think (I haven't tried this yet). DOCUMENTATION Documentation is in a bound manual almost 400 pages long. It is a bit boring to read (I didn't expect a best-seller, but...) and it lacks a tutorial. This isn't so nice, because the program has many, many functions and you don't learn them just by reading. But the easiest way to learn how to use this program is simply to use the program. LIKES Tools are a wonderful invention. I can change my music in almost every way I like without destroying the original recording. Non-destructive editing rules! Hybrid editing works fine. BPPro can record System exclusive dumps long "enough", whereas KCS is limited to 16 KB only. Importing and exporting MIDI files is easy. BPPro is expandable; for example, SuperJAM! can be integrated. DISLIKES Bugs :(. (Look below) The program has very strange windows. They may look "cool" with Kickstart 1.3, but with Kickstart 2.0 or better I would like to see gadtools.library used and normal Amiga windows. Drop AmigaDOS 1.3 support! There's no direct, good support for Amiga's 8-bit samples. A tool called "SamplePhone" does play samples, but every sample plays only on one pitch. Step recording should have a quick access to note lengths. For example, F1 should create a whole note, and F5 a sixteenth note. I would like to see more extensive pattern support. Access to some features requires little complicated maneuvers. More buttons and keyboard support are wanted. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS I've tried to use KCS but it seemed far too ugly and difficult to use. I'm a beta-tester for OctaMED Professional and have been using that program for over two years now. The direct tracker style is good for "computer music styles" like techno, not for "living" music. Also it's very difficult to export songs from OctaMED to other sequencers. Nowadays I mainly use BPPro. BUGS Lots of bugs. :( The printing of the notes is quite buggy. Sometimes, notes are printed without their stems. When I save extra-hires notes into an IFF file with the Save command, BPPro tends to go into "fireworks mode" (crash) very often. Also normal printing sometimes crashes. The hybrid editor usually works fine, but the notation editor has zillions of bugs. The notating resolution does nothing, and sometimes BPPro won't even show the notes (staff centering doesn't work). The punch-in recording should start playing one measure before the selected point, and then switch on recording. For about two weeks, it always started directly on the punch-in point. Now it works fine, though. Very strange. I had some trouble a while ago, when the program used to crash almost every time I started it... and if it did start, it still crashed in a few seconds. I re-installed BPPro and tried about everything, but nothing helped. Then I realized the problem: I had my Video Backup System on the serial port, and it constantly inputs video data to the Amiga. BPPro is the first program I've seen to crash when it receives that signal. And this one is really serious. Two times has BPPro crashed when saving the song, thus destroying both the older and newer version. That's unacceptable. VENDOR SUPPORT It does exist, but not here in Finland. 60 days of free technical support. WARRANTY I'm not sure about any warranties, but I think they are not essential with software products. CONCLUSIONS Despite the long list of dislikes and bugs, BPPro is a good sequencer, the best for the Amiga I think. If Blue Ribbon only fixed those bugs and added some comfortableness, this would be an almost perfect sequencer. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Every typo Copyright 1994 Clumsy Fingers Ltd. Unfortunately I do not have USENET access. For any comments or upgrade notices, please contact my friend Tapio Ronkainen, tron@westlink.fipnet.fi. He'll send your messages to me (I hope...). - Pasi Kovanen --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews