Stuffed with original features and with its own idiosyncratic approach to sequencing and multimedia, could this be the software Amiga owners have been waiting for? Review by Ian Waugh

The Amiga seems to have been wandering around in a bit of a musical wilderness of late. Perhaps Commodore realise they can't compete with the Falcon, PC and Mac in the music computer stakes. Although Steinberg ported Pro-24 to Amiga - eventually! - Cubase never made it and Emagic (C-Lab) have totally ignored it. Commodore don't seem to want to promote the Amiga in this direction and have even stopped loaning machines for review so we can't tell you how good - or bad! - the 4000 series is. Shame!

But as any dedicated user will tell you, the Amiga is jolly good at graphics and there's no earthly reason why it can't be used for music with the aid of a good sequencing package. That, of course, would open up its potential as a multimedia machine, too. Enter Bars & Pipes Professional Version 2. This program is actually an update of the original Bars & Pipes which was launched, ooh... back in 1990. Not only does it have lots of squiffy new features, it also has plenty of hooks for multimedia. So let's plug in and play.

The first thing you have to do is install the program onto a hard disk or floppies. The box says you need 1 Mb of RAM, but it lies. The program will run with 1 Mb from floppies but some bits won't load. If you have a hard drive you'll need more than 1 Mb of RAM anyway. But the manual doesn't point this out and you'll sit scratching your bum for an hour wondering why the thing won't boot after an apparently successful install.

Really, you need at least 2Mb of RAM, preferably more. If you want to write anything longer than jingles, you'll need 3Mb plus. Apart from that, the install routine is totally misleading and so we got off to a bad start, B&P and I, but I won't let that stand in the way of a developing friendship.

If you like graphic-oriented programs you'll love B&P. The main screen is the track list. The music goes in the left side and comes out on the right. Inbetween are pipes. The idea is to process the music by plugging various tools between the input and the output. A simple example would be to insert a transpose tool to change the pitch. You can plug several tools into a pipe so this could be followed by a quantise tool, a harmony tool, an inverter and a reverse tool - although God knows what the output would sound like!

The point is, with the exception of dedicated music languages and the Environment window in Emagic's Notator Logic, there is no other program which makes it so easy to change data, and many of these tools work in a musical way so the results are musical, too. Relatively.

It's a neat concept and one which works well. However, if your Amy isn't supercharged and you use a lot of tools - and who doesn't on a warm spring day? - the processing can effect playback integrity. Something to bear in mind.

B&P can show music data in several formats - notation, hybrid notation, piano roll, guitar tablature and in an event list. Hybrid notation is a cross between notation and a piano roll and shows the notes as blocks on stave. The notation side supports lyrics and will even save them with the music in a MIDI file. However, it's not quite a scorewriter.

The program uses windows and lots of 'em. As well as the main track window, there are windows for the editing tools, adjusting the master parameters and setting the metronome. There is a mixer window, a mini transport window, song construction and tempo windows plus a window for letting you create your own scales. If you're wont to use lots of windows at once then a larger than average screen would be useful.

Tracks may be grouped together and treated as a self-contained unit and there are sophisticated global edit functions such as quantise and a system of 12 flags which let you specify certain points in the music where you want to 'do something' such as punch in and out, loop sections or edit markers. There's also a moveable stop button which lets you halt playback at any position.

Bars & Pipes handles multimedia through its Media Madness tool. It uses a track-based approach common to most multimedia presentation programs; you assign various events to each track so one might play an animation, another might control the Video Toaster and others play a MIDI score. Media Madness integrates each media type using a tool designed for that particular medium.

So, for example, the toaster tool controls the Video Toaster and an IFF tool called The Last Slide Show controls the display of images.

There are lots of record, playback and edit options and there is support for most of the multimedia devices you can use with the Amiga - everything from showing IFFs and playing ANIM animation files to controlling a Scala performance and hardware such as Panasonic Laser Disks, the SunRize 12- and 16-bit boards, the GVP Impact Vision IV-24 card and G-Lock genlock unit and so on. And just in case they've missed something out, there's always the ARexx tool if you have the urge to type in commands.

In fact, it's easy to get so wrapped up in B&P's more exciting features that you forget about the basics. Musically it supports everything you would expect in a high-end sequencer - tempo maps, MIDI clock and SMPTE synchronisation, SysEx data, and Standard MIDI Files formats 0 and 1 (this is handled by a separate utility program). It also has a song arrange function (although it could have been better implemented) and a mixer, Mixer Maestro, which gives you real-time control over any MIDI controller. Mixing volume and pan settings are probably the two areas it will find the most work.

At 380 pages the manual is lengthy but it's well written (apart from the installation guide) and helps you work through the various parts of the program. With its advanced sequencing section and decent index, it's one of the better sequencer manuals around at the moment.

But is Bars & Pipes one of the better sequencers around at the moment? More to the point, can it help establish the Amiga as a computer for serious music and multimedia work? Yes and no.

To get the niggles out of the way first... Aside from the installation problem, B&P also has a few rough edges in certain areas. For example, the screen redraws each time you perform an edit which slows things down and can be annoying. And, perhaps because of the program's wealth of features, certain functions and operations do appear overly complex. It's a shame, too, that the notation side of things isn't more comprehensive and sophisticated as there's a dire lack of good sequencer-cum-scorewriters for the Amiga. Also, you really need a lot of RAM to get the most out of the program, and an Amiga somewhat faster than a bog-standard 500 would help, too, especially if you want to use Media Madness.

But for all that, B&P is one helluva program. It's certainly one of the most interesting sequencers on any computer platform and definitely the most innovative on the Amiga. You can't fail to be impressed by its range of tools and the various individual touches which make you think that the developers had dined out more than once on mulligan stew. Of course, the 'plumbing' approach may be just a touch too radical for some musicians and the program is rather idiosyncratic. But to help persuade anyone still sitting on the fence, the distributor has recently knocked a hundred quid off the price which may just tempt users up a notch from some of the £100+ programs. Certainly, for sheer creativity Bars & Pipes Pro is hard to beat. If you're into sequencing on the Far Side, you'll love it.

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