Here's value for musical money

Of the packages on the market which turn the BBC Micro into a musical instrument, many are inferior to FSoft's Music Maker, and none that I know of can compete with it in value for money.

For £9 you get a smart program that gives you many of the facilities found on expensive synthesisers and you don't have to be Mozart or Mike Oldfield to get bags of fun out of it.

The package comes on cassette and is built round two modules: The Sound and The Player.

The Sound allows you to alter the volume and pitch of sound shapes which are displayed as graphs, with active areas high lighted for easy editing.

Using the amplitude graph you can regulate the four phases associated with volume output - attack, sustain, decay and release. The pitch graph shows frequency modulation, and by manipulating various step-parameters you can produce vibrato, glissando, trills and other more exotic effects. Six teen envelopes can be held in RAM for instant recall and groups of 16 saved on tape.

The sound shapes can be heard by playing up to three notes simultaneously on the BBC keyboard (it's worth mentioning that many synthesisers can only handle one note at a time).

The range is four octaves and eight keys are set aside for percussive noises. The BBC Micro's audio output gives adequate results, but they can be dramatically improved if your micro is linked to an external amplifier and speaker.

The second module, The Player, is a sequencer — a device for reproducing sequences of pre-set notes.

It offers all the playing and output facilities of The Sound, but also has a user-definable split keyboard, so that two different envelopes can be accessed by separate sets of keys.

> Up to three lines of music can be recorded in real time and mistakes corrected if necessary with a Line Editor before saving to tape.

Sequences can be one-shot or repetitive and can be used in conjunction with a fairly versatile percussion generator. The Player display consists of a status page and a pair of staves on which the notes appear as you play them. They scroll across the screen making fascinating patterns but serve little practical purpose.

Time values are limited to minims and crotchets, there are no flats or naturals and leger lines are missing. However this shortcoming has to be set against some genuinely useful secondary functions, such as a metronome and a tuning facility.

> The whole package is quite friendly. Commands are entered with various combinations of the function keys, labelled on the strip provided.

Error-trapping is efficient and on-screen messages are clear.

The comprehensive documentation takes you step by step through the program and the system tape contains a demon stration sequence and some ready-made envelopes to start you off.

> Competition in the field of music software is certainly hotting up. Music Maker is on the crest of a new wave of increasingly powerful and well-designed packages which don't cost the earth.

Gabriel Jacobs