Following last month's look at Activision's Music Studio, we've acquired another new program that's gunning for the title of best music package on the C64. It's Island Logic's The Music System, which has at long last been adapted from the original BBC version.

Island Logic first designed The Music System for the BBC micro. Despite the BBC's many sound limitations (compared to the Commodore 64), the package was an instant success and has become one of the best music programs for the Beeb.

The Commodore 64 version threatens not only to set new musical standards but new standards of presentation, featuring icons, windows, and pop-up menus that make your humble C64 look like an Apple Macintosh.

The Music System is a complete software package designed to interface your musical ideas to your ears with the minimum of fuss and bother. The system is available on cassette, at £15.95, and on disk at £29.95. Both versions will have some form of turbo loader.

The Music System is made up of six separate but interactive modules accessed from a central menu page. There's a music editor, a sound editor, a keyboard composer, a printer module, a MIDI composer and a module to link together several short compositions to make a longer performance. Selecting options is generally done by pressing the spacebar.

Let's take the Music Editor first. This module is both the beginning and the end of your music files. Notes can be quickly entered on the staves that appear on a window set centre-screen. Directly above this window are the control windows for selecting volume and sound, an indicator that tells you which bar of music is currently in view, an event counter that tells you how many more notes you can enter, and a bar-meter display for each of the three voices.

This bar-meter features three solid bars, one per voice, the position of a fixed vertical line tells you the relative position of the window within your composition, and gives you a rough idea how much space you have left to work with, as well as indicating which voice is currently displayed on the stave, and which voices are selected for playback.

At the top of the screen is a menu selector, that I will describe later as it is constant throughout the modules.

The note that appears within the cursor bar (a white vertical stripe down the centre of the stave that indicates where your editing powers are concentrated) can be moved up or down to the desired position, set as sharp or flat, you can set its length and implement any number of purely musical functions such as rests, ties, triplers, repeats, etc.

When you have the right note in the right place, pressing Return fixes it and scrolls the stave across ready for the next note to be entered or altered. You can only enter notes for one voice at a time, but switching between voices is as easy as a keypress, and the cursor bar reappears at the same relative position in the new stave.

Playing back your composition is as easy as pressing RUN/STOP, and turning up the volume on your TV. Naturally, you can select any combination of voices for playable, including all three. Pressing Shifted RUN/STOP plays back just the voice currently in view, and you can see the music scroll across the window as it plays.

As I said earlier, the top line of the screen contains the indicators for the 'pop up' menus. There are four of these, and when the appropriate function key is pressed, the menu 'pops' into view, temporarily obscuring part of the screen.

The menu indicators read (from left to right) FILES, for all disc operations such as loading and saving, VALUES, for altering the functions relevant to the module you are working in (in the music editor module, some of the things you can alter are key signature, time signature and playback tempo).

The COMMANDS menu offers block editing, macro definitions, plus a whole host of features for the more experienced user. Also from this menu is the exit route back to the module selection screen.

The INFO menu is really only a display giving useful information like how many notes you have used in each voice, sound, volume and tempo settings, key signature, etc. This menu gives you all the data relevant to the file and module you are working on.

Now you have some music entered into the system, you might want to improvise a little. So you now go back to the main menu and select the Keyboard Module.

In many ways this is similar to the music editor module: notes can be entered, stored and played back in the same way. The difference here is that all note information is input in real-time, and the C64's keyboard is set up to resemble a piano keyboard.

Pressing a key on one of the top two rows plays the note and indicates both the note name and its position on a picture of a piano keyboard. The top line still offers the menu indicators and the voice barmeters are still there. But to the left of the keyboard picture is a metronome (a visual aid to help you keep time) and a record indicator.

Above the keyboard picture is the octave shift indicator, and above this is a panel that resembles that of a cassette recorder. This natty idea is your fast forward and rewind controls to get you to the right part of your score and playback, record and pause indicators.

This is the module I had most fun playing with, and is probably the best place to gain some quick experience with The Music System, as well as a good place to visit if you only have a few minutes to spare.

Once you have your music together, you will probably want to print it out onto paper (this is guaranteed to turn your mates green with envy) and this is adequately catered for within the TMS package.

The Printer Module operates in much the same way as the other modules, the menu indicators at the top, full-width music window and bar counter.

An additional clever feature of this media is a lyric window for entering and editing text to be printed out with your music. This window is just above the music window, and the music is automatically space out to line up with the text.

Various printers are catered for by TMS, notably Commodore's MPS 801, and MPS 802 printers, Epson's RX-80, FX-80 and MX-80 F/T, and Star's Delta 10. If your printer isn't here, don't assume it will work anyway, try it out in the shop with the software first!

At a time when MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is the word on everybody's lips, I am not surprised to see it featured strongly here. As MIDI is better discussed in depth elsewhere I won't go into detail here.

Suffice to say that TMS allows you to connect up to any MIDI compatible synthesizer and use its own keyboard to enter notes into the TMS MIDI editor. This, of course, is only half the story as you can play back recorded music using your synthesiser's own sounds.

The MIDI Module allows you up to six tracks (voices) to be recorded and/or played back, and full on-screen editing is available in keeping with the rest of the package.

If you run out of room in the Music Editor, all is not lost. The linker module lets you make a list of all the bits of a long composition (providing they are all stored on disk), and play them back one after the other. There is nothing to stop you stringing together half a dozen of your favourite tunes and listen to them one after the other, as many time as you wish!

Last, by no means least, the Sound Editor. The main attraction of this screen must be what the manual describes as the 'Dynamic Envelope Device'. This window display both a graphic and numeric representation of the current ADSR (attack, decay, sustain, release) parameters, as you alter the values, the shape of the graph alters to match.

It looks as though The Music System has added some extra wave generators to the normal SID specification as some of the things you can do in the way of special effects are normally quite out of the question!

This module incorporates a sequencer so that you can listen to a piece of music while you alter the sounds. This enables you to check that the effect works with the piece of music you intend to use that sound with. You will probably want to experiment with the Sound Editor module, and this appears by far the best way to get to know all its features.

The manual supplied is massive (about 50 pages) and deals in depth with each module in turn using pictures (actual screen dumps from the package) to make its point more clearly. What is missing however, is an index. An essential item I think, considering the complexity of the software, and a point I'm sure will be rectified before The Music System hits the shops.

Island Logic has taken so long to develop The Music System for the C64 that its competitors have stepped in with very respectable alternatives. But the time spent seems to have been worthwhile. The Music System is a complex program, much aided by its pictorial, icon and menu-driven method of operation. The package looks spectacular and the end-results are equally impressive. One more plus point, it won't bust your pocket.