PARAMOUNT

Rack Rap 'N Roll

CD-ROM

Instant gratification, that's what we want. The more plug-in-and-go something is, the better it sells. Nobody has time to read a manual anymore. People even make - and sell! - records without knowing the first thing about music. Don't you just love it!

Well, that's what Rock Rap 'N Roll is about. It's a sort of instant song assembly/jam machine. It comes on CD-ROM for the Mac or a multimedia-aware PC and, as you will have noticed from the heading, it's been produced by the multimedia arm of Paramount, the picture people.

It's insanely easy to use. There are ten styles - African, Big Band, Blues, Latin, Rap, Reggae, Rock, Soul, Street jazz and Techno Pop - each with ten loops or grooves. You drag these to the Song-A-Lyser to create a backing track and then click on certain areas of the screen or press keys on the QWERTY keyboard to play instrumental riffs, sound effects and vocals. Everything is kept very nicely in tune - though you can alter the pitch of sounds if you wish. You can also record your own voice, and (after a few rehearsals), record a session and save it to disk.

The sounds and grooves are put together from sampled material and are of uniformly excellent quality, having been arranged and played by 'proper' musos. Speaking of which, I think it safe to assume most proper musos wouldn't been seen dead using this kind of thing (although I suspect many would get a kick out of it anyway), but then that's not who it's aimed at. It's method of saving recordings in its own format means you can't load a session into other programs or use them as backing tracks for multimedia productions, which is a shame. But again, this isn't what it was intended for.

Rock Rap 'N' Roll is simply good fun. Pleb that I am, I played with the thing for ages. If you don't know a rap in the hood from a knock on wood, a maraca from a meringue and even if you have two left hands you can still sound good. I'm tempted to say even a drummer could use it but the Ed, ex-drummer that he is, would take it out. Isn't this the sort of musical instrument you've always wanted?

Price: £75.32
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Drive Racket

software for the PC

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't have believed it! This little program has more than doubled the speed of the hard disk in my PC!

When I first heard about Drive Rocket I thought it would use some special cache system - a form of buffering - which would speed up data transfers. But it doesn't. It actually makes use of a new technology in most modern IDE (AT interface) drives called 'read-and-write-multiple mode' - also called Multiple Block Size. MBS enables the system to read multiple blocks of data (well, what did you expect?) in one go instead of reading them singly. This result in an overall increase in the DTR (Data Transfer Rate).

Don't worry if you don't understand this, you don't have too. All you do is install the software and watch your drive go into turbo mode. How much faster are we talking here? Well, using Norton Utilities' benchmark, the before DTR was 222Kb/sec and the after DTR was 600Kb/sec. However, just to prove that benchmarks aren't the be-all and end-all of measuring computer performance, using PC Tools for Windows the before DTR was 460Kb/sec and the after rating was 1250Kb/sec. Whichever way you look at it, the performance has certainly been whacked up.

But before you rush out to buy Drive Rocket there are a couple of things you should know. It only works with IDE drives, not SCSI drives, and not all drives will benefit by the same amount. The docs actually suggest a 40 to 80 percent increase in speed but it could be anything up to 180 percent - although I suspect this is rare.

It's also important to realise that Rocket isn't going increase the overall speed of your PC by the same percentage. For example it seems to be faster at reading than writing and, of course, it isn't going to remove a video bottleneck on your system. But since installing Rocket the speed of my PC has increased considerably, especially when loading programs and large amounts of data.

So before buying Rocket, either phone Ontrack (notice the freephone number) and ask for a copy of the Rocket Test program or log onto the company's Bulletin Board and download RKT-TEST.EXE. This will analyse your system and tell you what sort of speed increase you can expect. Then you can buy it.

Incidentally, Ontrack are actually an international data recovery service and the company were so helpful with the Drive Rocket review I promised to give that side of the business a plug. So if your disk dies on you, you know who to call.

I've been using Drive Rocket for about a month with no ill effects. It only takes up 3Kb of RAM and it can be loaded into high memory. What else is there to say? It's a whiz!

Price: £31.73 [exc. P&P]
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ADDISON-WESLEY

The Incredible Sound Machine

by Mark Andrews

HAYDEN

Cool Mac Sounds

by Craig O'Donnell

Here's a couple of books to help you get more out of your Mac's internal sound. Well, actually it's about putting more in because the more you put in (...altogether now) the more you get out.

The Cool Mac Sounds book is the more lightweight of the two - lots of big pics, large text, and light blue highlighting. It's a real easy read; just the thing for you and your Mac to curl up with before hitting the big Shut Down switch.

A disk is included with the package containing lots of sound effects and music clips plus some 'INITs' and 'CDEVs' such as SuperClock and FKey Manager whose place on a sound disk is debatable, but anyway...

Sound manipulation programs include Sound Mover, Sound Control (which assigns sounds to System and Finder events), Sound Extractor (which grabs sounds from a file) and Sound Museum (a Finder archive for all System 7 sounds). There is also a Hyper Card stack containing a simple sound construction set.

Of the sounds themselves, there are plenty. Listen to 'MacPuke' do its stuff when you eject a disk. Drop 'Arrgh!!!' into someone's System folder and chortle as it screams at them from time to time. There's also a wealth of clean sound and vocal samples that could be useful in a QuickTime movie if you're that way inclined.

The book is basically an explanation of how to use the programs but it also contains useful info on sampling (Mac-sound related, of course), data files, resource docs and the like. It has a sprinkling of hints and tips and in all it's an easy jaunt through the world of the Mac sound machine...

Which is a pretty good title for a book, don't you think? Well Mark Andrews obviously believes The Incredible Sound Machine is a much better title and has produced a book to prove it. Altogether thicker and more substantial than Cool Mac Sounds, it's coverage is corresponding broader and the disk seems to have won out in the substantial programs awards, too. It tackles the same sort of area but in much more detail.

Included are the basics of sound, the rudiments of music, speech synthesis, and there are chapters about various shareware and commercial programs and tips for the prospective buyer. Even MIDI gets a look in with a few pages explaining the technicalities - though this is in no way a book for the MIDI musician.

The disk in the back of the book includes Sound App which was written by Apple as an example to developers of how to write sound software. It does little else other than play sounds. Unless you're a programmer.

Of more interest is SoundWave which is a reasonable, if basic, sound recorder and editor with features such as filtering and delay. It also contains a tone generator which constructs waveforms from sine waves. Quite educational really. Anyone remember additive synthesis?

Sound-Trecker is a MOD file player. If you're fortunate enough not to have an Amiga you will have been spared the plethora of Sound Tracker programs (although they are also prevalent on the ST, the Acorn Archimedes and the PC). MOD files are music files which store their data as numbers in order to compress it into a very small space. Anyway, you can now play these MOD files on your Mac. There are thousands of the things in PD land and Sound-Trecker will convert them to Mac format as well as playing them.

Other programs include HyperCorder (a recorder for Hyper Card - no surprises here), and HyperLab which converts English text to speech with the aid of MacinTalk which is part of the package. Good fun.

Listen tests your recognition of melody lines and chords and there's a demo of a commercial scorewriter called Songworks which has several very interesting features such as the ability to suggest and generate harmonic and melodic lines. It's distributed in America by Ars Nova, a company which doesn't seem to have a UK distributor. Shame. Both Songworks and Listen are MIDI compatible.

If you want to hone your Mac soundmaking ability with an eye to including sound in a demo or a Mac movie, both books will be of help. The Incredible Sound Machine is by far the most thorough, but the Cool Sounds book has a certain charm - and you'll get through it twice as quickly. If you simply want to dabble, play it Cool. If you want thorough and comprehensive you need Incredible.

Price: Cool Mac Sounds £18.50, The Incredible Sound Machine £27.27
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