REVIEW: DANNY AMOR'S "DA CAPO" CD-ROM VOLUME 1
Da Capo is a 575 megabyte collection of music modules (mods), instruments
and other music programs and utilities for the Amiga. "So what?", you
might ask, "There are plenty of other CD-roms available that have similar
programs and content." There are a few things that stand Da Capo apart
from these other CD collections.
First, Da Capo is designed for Amiga users. It has icons for all the
programs contained on it, so everything can be clicked on from Workbench.
The windows are positioned to appear at the correct size to hold all their
contents.
Second, it contains ready to run programs on the CD. It encompasses every
music editor, mod-player, and music utility that I know about on the
Amiga. Programs to note are: a full version of OctaMED 4 (mod editor),
AmiSOX (sound converter utility), Play16 (WAVE, AIFF and AU sound player),
DSound (IFF-8SVX sound player), and EaglePlayer (mod player). Also
included are Workbench 3.x datatypes (AIFF, AU, VOC and WAVE) for
supporting audio formats on other platforms, a demo version of OctaMED
v6.0, and various audio CD-Rom players.
Also on Da Capo are directories of instrument files already converted into
IFF, WAVE, AIFF, VOC and AU format. For all formats you will find samples
of drums, guitars, speech, fx and more. According to the author, there
are over 2,000 instrument samples in each sound format.
If you are like me, the music that is included on Da Capo is of most
interest to you. This, I am happy to report, is what I liked most about
Da Capo. I have listened to other mod CD collections like: 'The Ultimate
MOD Collection', 'Town of Tunes' and mods on the 'Aminet' CDs, however, my
largest criticism with these collections is that most of the mods fall
under the 'techno' music category. That is, songs with just a heavy beat
and a bunch of speech samples strung together. I'm not trying to pick on
this music style (I, in fact, like techno music), but I find many of these
mods to be boring and unoriginal. Da Capo has seem to step away from this
and offer a more complete range of music. I have only listened to a small
percentage of the 1,400+ mods on the disk, but many of them I have liked
so far. Already, I can tell that there has been more music on this CD
alone that I like, than what I have found on the other mod collections
that I have listened to.
Lastly, as extra added bonus to this CD, a real audio track with the song
"I Love You" by Gabriel Seher is included on the disc. You can pop Da
Capo into your compact disc player and listen to it as well.
Da Capo gets a definite thumbs up!
Da Capo is available from Amiga Library Services. (info@amigalib.com)