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TITLE        : HIS MASTER'S NOISE
NO. OF DISKS : 2
NO. OF SONGS : 100
AUTHORS      : MAHONEY + KAKTUS

From  a technical  point of  view, this disk is nothing short of amazing. The
programmers have managed to cram  100 pieces  of music  onto just  two disks,
presumably  by  using one  disk just  for the  instruments, the  other  being
reserved for the song data. Much more efficient where more than one tune uses
the same sound.

If you've seen  their previous music  disk, SOUNDS OF GNOME, you'll know what
to  expect in  terms  of  the presentation.  Flashy  graphics  with literally
hundreds of things going on at once  including a different  scroller for each
tune,  parallax  scrolling  multi-directional  starfield, parallax  scrolling
background at  the  bottom  of  the  screen in  front  of  randomly-displayed
messages,  and assorted  firework  displays  spewing  forth  from the  mouse-
pointer's position. There's also options for owners of 1 Meg machines to load
either all of  the instruments  into memory  at once, increasing  the loading
speed or to have three tunes loaded in at once and  the opportunity to listen
to all the songs sequentially in the disk's "LP" mode.

However, it's  not all great  and I found that the initial prefernce settings
for  the mouse  (including  simulated  gravity and  speed)  make  the pointer
difficult to control and  frustration soon  sets in. Also, the loading system
seems to be very temperamental and I found that it refused to load all of the
first  disk in  at once  (and that  was on  a 3 Meg  machine) and that it had
trouble on numerous occasions even loading individual songs.

As far as the music itself is concerned, none of them can be expected to have
superb instruments found  on disks with just  a few songs, so  they obviously
need to rely on the actually quality of  the composing, and a large number of
the "songs" fall  flat on their proverbial faces. There are a few really good
songs, but for the most part, they are really just average.

Most  of the songs  are composed  by Mahoney and  Kaktus themselves, although
there  are  a number  composed by  others including  a couple of  pieces from
Mantronix/Phenomena.

It's a  popular disk through  PD libraries, but  I would say that it's due to
clever marketing  hype, boasting  about the  quantity of  songs, rather  than
their quality. Still, if you get it, you may find a few pieces you'd like.

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