Multimedia on the PC starts here...

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Since the release of Windows 3.1, multimedia on the PC is no longer a dream. Its importance for musicians, other than that of offering a wider means of expression, is that it has created a boom in the number of music and sound related products for the PC. This has forced the price of these products to drop, because, of course, the multimedia market is much larger than the music market.

If you have a sound card, you can now play MIDI files and digitised audio on your PC, while at the same time displaying pictures or text. There's also software that can synchronise cartoon-type animations, and recently digital video readable straight from hard disk has become available - playback requires no additional hardware.

What's more, with multimedia you can create and store (on CD-ROM) electronic encyclopaedias, cartoons, computer movies, product demos and presentations, background art which can be shown on a screen to complement a laser and light show, educational programs, computer games, video effects, or just computer art. In short, little Hollywood on a PC is now possible, available, and cheap.

But how do you put a multimedia work together? It's rather like making a movie, and for that you need some of the qualities and skills of a director, as well as a powerful computer, some hardware add-ons, and software. Fortunately, on the software side, there's now a program that brings it all together: MediaBlitz! from Asymetrix, the company behind Toolbook, a professional multimedia authoring program which has been used to write about 30% of the world's CD-ROM titles (including Microsoft's Multimedia Beethoven - an encyclopedia type CD-ROM about Beethoven and his 9th symphony).

With MediaBlitz! it's possible, for example, to play a MIDI file synchronised with a digital audio file, or synchronise animation, video and still pictures with audio clips off a CD. It's probably the easiest product on the market to use for this purpose, and certainly one of the cheapest - a fairly rare combination this day and age. What it doesn't allow you to do, however, is design the individual elements - it just puts them together to create a multimedia 'score'.

To create the component parts of your multimedia production, you have to use other products. For example, you'll need a sequencer to compose your MIDI files (unless you prefer to buy them 'off the shelf'), a specialised program if you want animation and Microsoft's Video For Windows if you want to capture digital video. Additionally, for digital audio you'll need a sound board and a sound editing program.

Once you've created your MIDI files, digital audio files, animation files and whatever, it only takes a short time to put them together using MediaBlitz!

The program comes in three parts: the ClipMaker, the ScoreMaker and the ScorePlayer. The ClipMaker, whose screen looks like the track sheet of a sequencer program, is used for cataloguing multimedia clips from media files. These may comprise bitmaps (still images, photos, drawings etc.), WAVE files (Windows Digital Audio format), MIDI files (Type 0), Video For Windows (AVI) files, animation (Autodesk FLI or FLC) files and CD audio.

ScoreMaker enables you to combine, visually on the screen, different clips to make up a multimedia score. Each clip is pictured as a horizontal bar representing time, which you can move with the mouse to give a start time. Clips can be whole files (or parts thereof) with an accuracy of up to 1/1000th of a second.

Double clicking on a clip opens up a window. Here you can define clip parameters such as duration and position on the screen and also position pictures, animation and video by dragging them with the mouse.

ScorePlayer lets you play scores or link them to other Windows applications via OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). This is a Windows feature that allows for creations from one application to be used as part of another. For example, you can play a multimedia movie, or a multimedia presentation, or a song assembled in MediaBlitz! from a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentation program or other program that supports OLE as a client. There's also a set of commands that can be used to link your media scores to Toolbook or any program written in C.

MediaBlitz! comes on a CD-ROM, and installation is quite painless. When everything is up and running, the program takes up about 1.5Mb of disk space, and there's another 18Mb of demos which you can keep on your hard disk or delete selectively. It's also worth mentioning that MediaBlitz! can read - and you can therefore use in your work - images stored on a Kodak Photo CD.

Lastly - and most importantly - you also get a free runtime version of the ScorePlayer that allows you to freely distribute your work, so that other people who don't have MediaBlitz! can play it.

THE LAST WORD

Ease of use	Very easy to get into
Originality	Highly original at this price
Value for money	Certainly
Star Quality	In abundance
Price	£85.00 RRP
More from	Ingram Micro, (Contact Details)