CompuServe Thread

(Fara Shimbo replying, actually…) For goof's sake, don't be embarrassed! As Allan Sherman once said, no one's perfect. DMCS is, so far as I'm concerned, the best thing that's happened to the Amiga yet; I've spent countless hours playing with it when I *should* have been working on paying my bills. The only picky thing I find with it, which to others may be a majmajor problem, is that at times the Menu Bar at the top of the window goes blank. I have been unable to reproduce the effect reliably, but it *usually* happens when I ask for an instrument whose file has been trashed or which is on the other disk. (Come to think of it, the instruments in question are from the Instant Music disk.) I've found that if I just sit and eat M&Ms for a few moments, the problem clears itself up. Sort of like Garbage Collect type of things I used to get with MBasic. Doesn't bother me, really, I've got LOTS of M&Ms, but I've heard other people griping bitterly about the same kind of thing. Other than that, THANK YOU THANK YOU for the only thing that has a chance to get me over my fear of piano lessons…… Fara

Jeff: Apart from the disappearing measures menu, which I can't really nail down, the thing that piques me the most is the MIDI input. If I enable MIDI input, all I have to do to kill DMCS is hold down a chord for a non-trivial length of time. Several seconds is usually enough to do it. I'm using an ECE MIDI interface on a 512K machine. Something that annoys me about DMCS is the time it takes for the program to respond to menu button presses. It's like trying to run through a lake full of Jell-o. I also thought it would be nice if one could configure the program to use less than the normal number of bit planes. This would make refreshing faster, and free up some memory for those of us with 512K. It seems to be using 3 planes now; Am I correct? The "flash notes" feature doesn't always clean up after itself; that is, sometimes little bits of flash get left behind. [Aside: Do you know where I can get documentation for FORM SMUS and FORM DMCS?] I often find myself wishing for more keyboard shortcuts. That's all that comes to mind immediately. Regards, Lee Johnson

Count me in as another one with the Midi input blues. Using a Golden Hawk Technologies "Midi Gold" interface, I find that playing a quick run of notes or holding a chord will bring swift action from the Guru. Better not to have Midi input at all then to tease us with the prospect, and then snatch it away at the first chord!

The Measures menu is still there it just cannot be seen. It will usually disappear after loading an instrument from another disk. I have been successful in making picks from the menu sight unseen. After a while the file requester window will go blank when trying to save a file. (I tend to swap disks frequently). When this happens the only thing that can be done is ctrl-closedA-openA. Every now and then the system will hang. Unfortunately I have not figured out what conditions cause it. Joe

Hi, Jeff. As with some of the others, my major problem is with MIDI in, the symptoms being the same as those described by others, so I won't repeat. (Obviously very repeatable) MIDI hardware is by Speech Systems. The other complaint may not be a gripe about a bug at all, if it was never intended to be included; the lack of much about MIDI in the manual leaves this uncertainty. I am disappointed by the lack of support for velocity output to the MIDI port. I had been drooling over the capability of dynamics, changing within the score, yet cannot send it to my DX27, or at least have not found a way to. Again, this may have never have been a goal, due possibly to further overhead in an already "busy" program. Nevertheless, I'm ecstatically happy to have this package, even as it stands. More so, that EA is willing to take input for improving bugs from the masses. Admirable. Karl Sparklin