About This Particular Macintosh 6.04 - eDisk

Or My Microphone?Melody Assistant doubles as a simple digital hard disk recorder. Audio can either berecorded live, or imported from several common formats, including AIFF, WAVE, and MP3.When using the digital outputs, the patches from the sound database and the digital audiotracks appear together in a central mixing console. The result is a nicely packaged softwarebaseddigital studio that takes up little RAM, compared to higher-end packages.Quirks and QualmsMelody Assistant includes a mixed bag of additional features. Some are nice, like the extensivesupport for tablature. Others are unnecessary, such as including graphic files and coloredstaves and notes. Finally, a few are quite esoteric. I honestly can’t think of anotherapplication that includes both drum machine grids and extensive support for Gregorianchant. Perhaps this is the strange beauty of shareware, written by programmers for theirown needs then sold for a little extra pocket money.That said, I have some reservations about the interface. Though the tools themselves areeasy to understand, the sheer number of palettes contributes to an overall clutter. The helpwindow is nice, but it is always in the foreground, and can only be resized. The preponderanceof blue bars reminds me a little too much of Windows—I like my Mac software to looklike Mac software—and the decision to place the close box on the right side of the window(example above) bewilders me. For the price, though, it’s a very good package, and I’d rec-ATPM 6.04 ← 110 →Stuff: Melody Assistant 5.0