Sequencing on a Shoestring

Sep 1, 2005 12:00 PM, By Dennis Miller, Brian Smithers, and Geary Yelton

In the open project's window, inputs are on the left, and data is in the middle, with processors and outputs on the right (see Fig. 9). At the bottom center is the Properties panel, which lets you access the parameters of any object that you select. If you select a MIDI input, you can change MIDI channels, turn on input quantization, and so on. If you select an audio input, you can specify parameters such as file format and bit depth.

Tracktion's unique graphical approach extends to plug-ins and other effects, which are called Filters. By default, each track has filters for volume, panning, and a level meter. You can insert an additional filter in series with the others by clicking on and dragging it from the New Filter icon and then selecting it from a list. Filters include instrument plug-ins as well. The GUIs of most plug-ins appear in their own windows, just as you'd expect, but most of them look almost out of place in Tracktion's flat, 2-D landscape. If you want, you can lock them in place on top of the sequencer's GUI.

Tracktion Packed

One of the first things I noticed about Tracktion was its complete lack of commands in the Menu bar — there isn't a File menu, an Edit menu, and any of the standard Mac or Windows GUI features. Buttons, sliders, and text fields are used for most tasks, and virtually nothing is hidden. Although there isn't an event-list editor, when you click on a note in the track display, you can edit its properties in the Properties panel's MIDI Event window.

If you aren't thrilled with Tracktion's appearance, you can customize the colors of just about everything onscreen. Tracktion can fill the screen no matter what size your monitor is, or you can scale it to make additional room for plug-ins or ReWire-synchronized applications.

Tracktion's user interface is so nonstandard that it could take a while for you to begin performing basic tasks, but it all falls into place once you grasp its GUI. The same traits that might be disorienting at first translate into speed and ease of use after you learn your way around. Because Tracktion's appearance is so unusual, it might be easiest to learn if you're unfamiliar with other sequencers.

Magix Music Studio 10 Deluxe (Win, $79.99)
Magix Music Studio is another case of split personalities, consisting of MIDI Studio and Audio Studio. One look at MIDI Studio and you'll know that Magix collaborated with Emagic — the resemblance to Logic is unmistakable (see Fig. 10). If you felt abandoned when Apple bought Emagic and discontinued Logic for Windows, you might want to give Magix MIDI Studio a try. Although it doesn't include the same soft synths that have made the most recent versions of Logic such a great package, it does include some worthy instruments of its own. The interface, terminology, and functionality that you knew and loved (except for the Environment) is there, right down to the fonts and track icons.

If you're less familiar with Logic, here's the rundown: MIDI Studio is a powerful sequencer that supports audio tracks and soft synths. You insert a soft synth on an Audio Instrument track, which holds mix parameters for the synth and its MIDI performance data — a powerful and convenient implementation. You can create and edit MIDI controllers in the HyperDraw view and process them in the Transform window. There is standard piano-roll editing in the Matrix Edit view, and a Drum Edit view and Event List are also among the edit windows. As many as 90 different Screensets can recall specific combinations of views with a keystroke.

MIDI Studio's audio features are extensive, including nondestructive clip editing in the Audio Window and sample-accurate editing in the Sample Editor. There are a number of useful effects, ranging from EQ and compression to reverb, and DirectX effects are supported. Music Studio was upgraded to version 10 just as we were finishing this roundup, and new to MIDI Studio is ReWire support, allowing integration with such staples as Propellerhead Reason and Cakewalk Project5. The one major audio limitation is MIDI Studio's 16-bit, 48 kHz maximum resolution.

The Better Half

Audio Studio's lineage is as impressive as that of its fraternal twin: it owes a great deal to Magix's pro-audio software Samplitude, a well-respected (if underutilized) DAW. Audio Studio doesn't have MIDI support, but it does come with several pattern-based soft synths, ranging from a virtual live drummer and an old-school drum machine to a vocoder (see Fig. 11).

One of Audio Studio's most interesting new features is the addition of Elastic Audio Easy pitch manipulation. With a graphical interface resembling that of the most famous pitch-correction programs, the Elastic Audio Easy editor does credible manual and automatic pitch correction and manual audio transposition. Although I doubt Elastic Audio Easy will supplant its more-famous peers any time soon, I was able to use it to retune and harmonize vocals discretely, as well as create the infamous Cher effect without so much as a glance at the manual.

My favorite discovery, however, was Audio Studio's CD-creation features. It can burn a disc-at-once Red Book CD directly from a project without having to bounce it first — you simply add track markers and burn away. You also have complete control over the placement of Index 0, also known as the “pregap.” It took exactly ten seconds for me to create a “hidden” track in the pause between tracks 1 and 2, something that many dedicated CD-burning programs don't allow. CD Text and subindices are also easy to create.

Unlike MIDI Studio, Audio Studio supports 24-bit audio and features a 32-bit floating-point audio engine. If the MIDI features of MIDI Studio and the audio features of Audio Studio were combined in a single program, Music Studio would be a formidable DAW. As two separate applications, it's still a formidable bargain.

Midisoft Studio Ensemble 2003 (Win, $84.95)
Studio Ensemble 2003 is actually a pair of applications. Studio 2003 XP (see Fig. 12) does most of the heavy lifting, and AudioPro Wave Editor lets you edit and process audio clips. Such a division of labor is similar to using an external audio editor with Cakewalk Home Studio, but Studio 2003 XP's audio support is far more limited than Home Studio's. Furthermore, the two applications are not tightly integrated: you must save your changes to a file in AudioPro and then reimport it into Studio 2003.

Studio 2003 approaches sequencing from a traditional music-notation perspective and allows much more manipulation of the printed page than most sequencers, especially those in its price range. Complex meters, ornaments, dynamics, rehearsal markings, articulations, bowings, chord symbols, chord fingerings, odd clefs, and more are available from a point-and-click palette. Most of those symbols, however, do not affect playback.

A standard piano-roll view allows you to enter and edit MIDI parts. As in the score editor, you must select a note value from the palette and then click on the spot where you want to insert a note. Once a note has been inserted, you can use the mouse in Selection mode to relocate it or change its duration. A Controllers pane below the Notes pane allows simple graphic editing of tempo, continuous controllers, pitch bend, Channel Pressure, and more. You can edit Velocity by right-clicking on a note and then editing the value in a dialog box.

You can combine audio clips with the MIDI tracks or even record audio parts in Studio 2003, but you can't display audio and MIDI side by side. You can drag audio clips across eight audio tracks, but even simple copy and paste operations are unavailable. Interestingly, each audio track has a Frequency control that actually changes the track's playback speed. It's not a time-stretching feature because pitch changes with the speed.

Riding the Wave

Studio Ensemble's audio editor AudioPro supports a variety of basic file-based audio processes (see Fig. 13). You can easily reverse all or part of a file, trim to selection, and change the DC offset (although the program doesn't give you a method for measuring the existing offset). With only one level of undo, however, a degree of caution is in order. AudioPro has EQ, normalization, and automatic pop and hiss reduction. All processes with user parameters are controlled by text values within a single dialog box. Echo, chorus, flange, and fades are possible, but reverb isn't available. AudioPro doesn't offer any provision for auditioning effects.

If printing musical scores is your primary purpose in selecting sequencing software, Studio 2003 may be your cup of tea. Don't expect to create CD-ready tracks, however, because it's not that kind of a program. It allows you to track a scratch vocal over your MIDI-performed score, and for some folks, that will be sufficient.

Studio 2003 and AudioPro crashed a few times during my testing — the programs would lock up, requiring the three-finger salute. Midisoft has an update that is said to fix some bugs, but when I downloaded it and ran the updater, it refused to install because the folder to which the original CD installed the software was not the same folder in which the updater wanted to find it. The updater didn't give me the option to install it in a different folder.

PG Music PowerTracks Pro Audio 10 PowerPAK (Win, $69)
PowerTracks Pro Audio 10 is at the low end of the price continuum, yet it offers a good balance of audio and MIDI features. In fact, it may be the best bargain in the bunch. (An even lower-price version, for $49, is comparable in features but comes with less additional context.) For starters, it has some nifty setup options, such as the ability to choose any DXi synth on your system as the default sound engine. There are some unique interface elements — for example, the drum window shows actual pictures of the drums in the General MIDI drum set (see Fig. 14). You can play the drums by clicking on their pictures or by using keyboard shortcuts, and you can record drum hits as you play them.

PowerTracks Pro's audio-editing features range from the commonplace to the unusual. Among the former are reverb, echo, chorus, EQ, pitch shift, and flange (though surprisingly, there's no normalize option); and among the latter are the ability to merge multiple, separate audio clips on a track into one continuous clip; the ability to split a stereo track into two mono tracks; and the Auto-Harmonize feature, which is based on TC Electronic's algorithms. In addition to creating a single harmony track at some interval from an existing track or using the notes in a MIDI track as starting notes for new parts, PowerTracks Pro can generate harmony parts based on any chord symbols that you have placed into your song.

In the MIDI arena, Power-Tracks Pro has a number of features that can assist you in your music making. It lets you fill a track with a preexisting note/rhythmic pattern, which is great for making drum tracks quickly. It can also rechannel MIDI data or substitute one type of controller data for another. Its Data Filter lets you isolate specific types or ranges of data (only notes between C4 and C5, for example) for selection prior to editing, and it offers many ways to fine-tune your music, including transposing, sliding, or changing the length of notes.

Taking Notes

PowerTracks has the page-layout and printing options of a good notation program, but the note-entry functions are well below that level. To enter a note in the notation window, you must either choose a note duration from a drop-down menu or let the program automatically determine what note value you want based on where in the measure you click. Entering dotted notes and tuplets isn't as easy as it could be, and there's support for only a few time signatures. Nevertheless, the printouts look great, and the engraver spacing and other professional features make the notation option a big bonus.

Guitar players will appreciate PowerTracks Pro's offerings. A configurable fretboard display shows notes as they're being played, which can be useful for figuring out fingerings. A Guitar-Cleanup window lets you adjust the timing of individual channels of data received from a MIDI guitar. The tuner plug-in can track the frequency of an incoming signal and show how sharp or flat the notes are. The tuner can also generate a variety of tones.

PowerTracks Pro has numerous other features that I haven't mentioned due to space constraints. Its printed manual, though not exhaustive, is more than adequate, and I didn't experience any glitches or crashes during many hours of using the program.

Sagan Metro LX 6.3 (Mac, $134.99)
The history of Metro is long and convoluted. Developed by Jeremy Sagan, Metro began life in 1989 as Dr. T's MIDI-only Mac sequencer Beyond. Macromedia acquired Beyond and changed its name to Metro, pairing it with the audio program Deck. Soon thereafter, a company called OSC gave Metro audio-recording capabilities and eventually sold it to Cakewalk. It has now grown into a family of digital audio sequencers from Sagan Technology.