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Composer is a remarkable package is several ways. It is fundamentally a music processor enabling you to write music for the computer to play in a most versatile fashion. It comes with three demonstration tunes which reveal the Oric's tremendous musical capabilities in a way that has to be heard to be believed.

I know Oric sound was good, but it takes software like this to bring it out to the full.

The three-part score can be displayed in hi-res graphics and the music is entered as bars using the three sound channels. Various options are available to build up to 80 bars. Each channel is separately programmable for volume and decay rate and special options can be set globally, although I seemed to find a bug in controlling the volume of channel two.

Tunes can be saved and loaded separately from the main program which is written in completely self-contained Forth - you need no additional software - showing the versatility of that language for this type of program.

There is also a competition offering £100 and £50 for the best two productions.

P.S.W.