From: de19@umail.umd.edu (Dana S Emery)
Newsgroups: rec.music.early
Subject: DMCS 2.5
Date: 22 Nov 92 21:22:02 GMT
Followup-To: rec.music.early
Organization: personal

I have explored Delux Music Construction Set rather thoroughly, and have
consulted extensively with its authors and its vendor.

I used it during 1989-1991, and published several original and traditional
songs with it.  I was even able to make musical examples for inclusion in a
doctoral thesis.  But that was then.

I dont recomend it for serious work NOW for several reasons.

The Vendor says it wont ever be upgraded.

It is riddled with bugs, and can be very quirky to use.

It is a port of the Amiga program of the same name, and the interface is
limited to the LCD of both machines, which is unfortunate for Mac users.

Specific bugs:

Inaccurate transposition --- occaisional notes will be rendered either as a
wrong enharmonic (common problem), or, occaisionally, an actual wrong note
(off by a 1/2 tone).

In some circumstances, the program will allow one to close a dirty file
without saveing it, and with no warning.  Also, when one "Closes" a window,
the file isnt actually saved at that time, but the program waits untill you
open another file, or quit to do the Save.  

Repeat notation is limited to 1st and 2nd notation, and is buggy as
implemented.  Often the playback wont recognize the repeats one has written
in untill one reenters the various parts in a different order, which order
is neither intuitive nor discussed in the  manual.

Crashed, leaving my HD corrupted, under 6.0.7---which is when I swore off
use of it.

Misfeatures:

The program ships with Sonata bitmaps installed in the program, which is an
instant loose in a Multifinder environment, as one is likely to have Sonata
installed in the system for use by other programs.  Not all users are
sufficiently Mac cognizant to use FontDA mover to abstract the bitmap
resources from the program and construct a conflated Sonata bitmap
suitcase.  IMHO, the program should have been shipped with a seperate
suitcase file.

Print Setup... parameters are not saved with the document, so the user has
to remember them independantly. (12 pt Sonata is the default staff size,
75%, or 80% reduction looks better than 100% for most music).

The instrument editor seems incapable of making a good sounding reed.

The development was done long before system 7, so it is highly unlikely
that this turkey is capable of running under system 7, and it is highly
likely that it is dependant on the old version of the sound manager (6.0.5
-).  Should the MIDI manager ever get "improoved", I suspect it will break
there as well.  This leaves one with a declining population of machines on
which to run it.

Oh, yes, I dont think any of the traditional mail order places sell it
anymore either, I havent seen it in the catalogs of MacPlace, MacWharehouse
or MacConection recently.

Conclusion:

Its unfortunate that such potential has been discarded by Electronic Arts'
(the vendor) decision to concentrate on the games market.  The note entry
interface of DMCS was an excellent one (Tognozzi cited it in his GUI video
for Mac developers), some mild tweaking to the key equivalents would have
made it highly productive, and an EPS export facility would have made it my
tool of choice over most any other Music editor.  

All it seriously lacked was an interface for user control over
placement/shape/font of some of the anotation symbols.
--

Dana S Emery <de19@umail.umd.edu>
Newsgroups: rec.music.early