Conference napalm::commusic_v1

232.0. "Texture Review" by SPHINX::SAVAGE () Wed Jan 29 1986 16:45

                           TEXTURE

     A Short Review of the Cherry Lane IBM MIDI Sequencer
                        Dennis Savage

I won't talk too much here about any of the MIDI 
basics...just tell you what Texture will and will not do and 
how well I think it works. Specifically how well the actual 
function performs and how well the human interface is 
engineered with respect to user ease of operation...etc.

To cut it short for some of you, be forewarned that Texture 
is a sequencer only. It does not score. It has no visual 
editing features at all. It is essentially a play it by ear 
package only.

When it comes actually recording a sequence Texture is a 
relatively straightforward package. You must first define an 
"event", which is their way of saying how many bars you want 
to record and in what time signature. The default is 8 bars 
of 4/4. This holds for all 64 tracks. You change tracks with 
the gray + and - keys on the right side of the keyboard. To 
record you hit the R key twice. Hitting the spacebar stops 
the record process immediately. You are then prompted for 
input as to weather you want to keep or audition the track. 
If you have set the loop parameter by pressing the L key 
before you went into record mode you will be asked which 
loop you want to keep or audition. Loops start at 0 and go 
on up to some number where you run out of RAM. I don't like 
the fact that there can be a loop zero. It should start at 
1. You can audition as much as you want and then save the 
one you like or abandon it all by hitting a CR instead of A 
for audition or S for save. If you decide to save the take 
it is inserted into the track and you can do all the 
standard things like set the MIDI channel and  name the 
track. One serious fault is that the track specific channel 
and name information is not saved to disk with the actual 
MIDI note data. Really stupid oversight. You can also 
quantize an entire track at a time but get this - you are 
stuck with it. You can't go back to the real time input 
data. This is so stupid that for me it's enough to get rid 
of the whole thing. You can get around this problem by 
copying the data to another track and then experimenting on 
the copied track but it's a pain in the %*# and sort of 
dirty work is what the computer is for. The user can get 
burned because they don't mention this in the documentation. 
There are some nice features here, though. It's easy to copy 
on track or phrase to another track. It's easy to glue the 
end of on phrase or track to the beginning of another. 
Changing from phrase to phrase is also very easy. You can 
get through a whole composition like this without ever 
really constructing a song if you want. The metronome can 
count down a variable number of bars on record or 
playback...it will be the same for both. I think default 
should be off for playback. You 
can set the number of metronome clicks per beat. This is an 
interesting and novel feature. Almost everything you do in 
Texture can be done with one keystroke. Three is about the 
most except where you have to answer a lot of "Yes, I'm 
sure" queries. Editing the track data after you get it is 
about the worst I have ever seen. Badly though out and 
non-workable even if they had done a better job of it. They 
give you a list of the notes and the associated MIDI data in 
a typed list on the screen. You can't see very many of them 
at a time and what you can see is for the most part of no 
use at all. If you know you want to get a note to start a 
bit sooner or stop a bit later or change the pitch by a half 
step or so you are in trouble. They tell you where in the 
beat it started and stopped to the .xx decimal place. What 
the hell does that mean? I want to see some sort of graphic 
representation I can make some sense of. The short and long 
of it is that if you want to edit don't bother with Texture.

I think I'll cut it short here. Texture just doesn't do 
enough and some of what it does is so stupid that it's just 
not a good choice for anyone I can think of. Some of the 
Packages for the C=64 from Syntech are better than this by 
far.

If anyone has a specific question I didn't cover (there are 
a lot) reply and I'll answer.

Dennis

You implied that it has no graphic display.  Just what does it
display in editing mode?  Anything?
    John Sauter

What is displayed is a text list of the midi note events. Within this list you
get the beat number (1.32 or 4.68...etc.), weather it's a note on or note
off, and the velocity parameter (0 to 256). In the editing section you can
ask the program to find a particular beat or note. If you are pointing at
a particular note event you can ask to see the matching note off/on event. If
you want to change any of the displayed parameters you can cursor over to
it and edit it. About 12 MIDI events can be viewed at a time. PgUp and PgDn
page you through the list. You use the up and dwon arrows to scroll the list.

Texture does not actually use any graphics at all. They put the screen into
40 column color mode and just leave it there. Admittedly the IBM graphics
adapter is not that great but can certainly suffice most needs if used
carefully. 

Dennis

Well...doesn't sound much better than my "home-grown" MIDI
software.  I used to have graphics, but removed it for lack
of memory space.

Thanks for the review.
    John Sauter

    Is this the latest word on Texture?  
    
    I saw an ad for it in the latest issue of Keyboard (Jam&Lewis, Kitaro)
    and it advertised an Amiga version as well.  Surely there is a more
    graphic interface for this machine.  They also listed a number of
    people who use it, including, of course, Todd Rundgren, who used it for
    his one-man show, as described in a recent Musician (I think). 
    It seems like it may well be a more sofisticated program nowadays.
    
    Does anyone know if a Mac version is in development?              
    
    
    Richard