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Algomusic 2.2

Do you, like me, get tired of these mountains of highly suspect (I'm being kind) modules found on the Aminet? Algomusic touts itself as your saviour because this one program synthesizes music at random for an infinite variety of tunes. There's two suspect issues here, of course, can a computer make music and even if it can, will it be any good?

AlgoMusic The answer is yes to the first count, at least. German Thomas Schürger has adequately related common techno/house styles into an algorhthm or rather a set of them. He then varies these controlling the general arrangement of the tune, selection of instruments, percussion, melody and even speech samples. Naturally he's picked an easy target with tecno/house but if you like this kind of music (and I do) then it's in with a running start.

Since the earlier versions, Thomas has drastically improved the range of samples, quality of synthesis and added a good array of options in a seperate (MUI) prefs program. The program remains driven by the CLI but the prefs change the program in real time obviously by some kind of message port. There's even documentation for developers to add on to Algomusic!

AlgoMusic So what's it sound like? It sounds... strange one song, bad for another and then pretty darn great for another. The general style is unmistakable but there's good variety and the overall quality is a lot better than your average module, or at least it seems right now. Thomas' algorythms know a dodgy note, unlike some module authors it appears.

The archive is a good 1.2MB in size, definately worth a download to check it out, even if it's not your thing. The installer is well behaved so it'll only take a minute to check out. If you get right into it, you might like to set about creating an extended/different/better sound sample set. If so, let us know!

You can get Algomusic off the aminet in the path mus/misc/AlgoMusic2_2.lha.
4 star

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