A LOT of software writers have neglected the Acorn "BBC" computer for music purposes in favour of the Commodore 64 — tempted no doubt, by the latter machine's success in the US and the promise, therefore of those extra valuable dollars in the purse. Homegrown Brit programmers have started to turn slowly to the BBC, however, and here's an example which fell through our letterbox the other day all the way from Brighton. There's been some funny noises in Brighton recently, what with one thing and another.

A little signature tune over the title page gives you an indication of FSOFT's possibilities as you load the thing: a crashing of electronic dustbin lids amid Casioid peeping and glooping that poses as a tune. Loading does, in fact, go smoothly and relatively quickly, and the first part of the program that we see is an envelope-type display with the words Amplitude Display underneath. Indeed pressing one of the "notes" — from amongst two of the rows of the BBC QWERTY keys — gives a grating noise that follows the shape of the envelope.

The program has two levels of operation: "THE.SOUND" and "THE.PLAYER" (with the computer business's annoying and ungrammatical habit of flinging full stops into lines of words for no apparent reason other than, I imagine, that they think it looks deeply fab). The first lets you set up, alter and store sounds you make up with the control facilities offered, the latter to play and sequence the sounds and fiddle with rhythm patterns on vaguely percussive noises.

Press your friendly ESCAPE key and you're at a menu, giving options to go to either of these levels, and in between them to store or recall internally up to 15 settings of sounds or "envelopes" as they call them, recall tape-dumped sounds or store new sounds onto tape, or show you streams of numbers which tell you the make-up of the 15 sorted "envelopes".

Setting up new sounds is what we'd want to get down to fairly quickly, as the range of sounds you can load in from the program tape, from a clanky "woodwind" to an annoying "Star Wars", is limited in application. So we can call up from the menu a team of "default" values, that is, values that will exist if we do nothing, and work from them to get the sounds we want. Well, closer to the sounds we want, anyway.

There are two different displays per "envelope" to fiddle with: the previously mentioned Amplitude Display — the way the sound changes in volume — and the Pitch Display — the way it changes, you guessed, in pitch.

On the Amplitude Display, you'll meddle with "Step Time" (which, confusingly, has nothing to do with sequencing, but controls the time over which the displayed shape affects your sound), or with the more familiar Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release, which do as you'd expect.

On Pitch Display I had a bit more trouble matching what was going on in the display with what my ears were hearing. This section seems to be a way of displaying what's inherent to the BBC's sound capabilities anyway, and is labelled "step" and "phase" alteration. Changing values — numerical values, natch — on this set-up is tricky, combining the COPY key with the up and down arrow keys — held down, the direction keys will roll the numbers pronto, but don't stop when you do. They just keep going for an indeterminate period. So getting to numbers some distance away can be a tiresome prod, prod, prod affair, especially as the range is 127 down to -127.

Having sorted some noises out — and my lot were definitely noises — we ascend to the next level, "THE.PLAYER". Here we're faced with a rather clumsy "sequencer" display: at first sight a nifty-looking stave sits up top. But put some notes in from the keys and you get whole notes coming in from the right of the stave, whizzing along the stave lines and off the other end. All you get accurately from your input is a pitch "reading" — ie the notes sit on the correct line or space of the stave. I think this is what we call a gimmick. Also, unless you choose a suitable clock speed, notes merge into each other as they whizz along the scale. You have to learn not to beat the clock, and there's a metronome peep you can turn on to aid this clocking-in.

So you can put in sequences in simple step time, notes and spaces, regulated by your clock speed and seemingly to a maximum of 1028 steps. It wasn't at all clear to me what sound I was putting into the sequencer here, nor how to recall other sounds I'd stored to use. I must admit my results were a bit of a mess and very limited, anyway, by the steppiness of it all. There's a rhythm generator about here, too, which works in a similar way, using numbers below the stave to indicate different percussion sounds, all of which sounded very crunchy. Nowhere do FSOFT explain, for example, how they got the relatively pleasant dustbins over the title-page accompaniment.

In fact their instruction booklet leaves a lot to be desired. The details are organised in a haphazard manner, and continually refer you backward and forward. A clear idea of where you are at any given time and how to use bits and pieces from elsewhere in the program is absent.

The program is worth nine quid if only to display the BBC's sound potential — it's naturally better than not being able to see what you're doing. With some lengthy operations and, I would think, your own set of notes to remind you what's where, you could probably start to get some musical noises out of the controls on offer.

But one constantly comes back to the problem of the BBC's limited sound potential, not helped by the minuscule speaker inside and the absence of an output socket to deal with the audio signals more decently. As FSOFT point out, you could fit a socket yourself (they tell you how to) but this soldering and drilling would invalidate your guarantee on the computer. Also, QWERTY keys don't do good service as music keys. We look forward to a bright person developing a push-on music keyboard for the BBC like the version for the Commodore mentioned elsewhere in this issue.

FSOFT music maker program: £9

CONTACT: FSOFT, (Contact Details).