Labels:text | screenshot | font OCR: AM/FM Title : Beatbox Producers : Dataclan 17Bit no.: 2615A, 2615B Musicians : Various No. Disks : 2 No. Tracks: 16 AM/FM This took a long time to boot up, not content with IFF screens saying "Dataclan", round. and "Beatbox", it also loaded up and animation of a disk spinning Finally we're at the menu screen, writing a review of 16 songs would be far to much for a lazy person such as myself, so I've picked out my personal top 5. A King is Born: Easily the best song on the two disks. Kicking off with a faced paced bass line, against some dark deep string chords, as the main theme of music slowly fades in, played on some synth strings. The drums started quite without warning, changing the mood of the piece quite dramatically. This is something I really appreciate, as it seems to vary the music immensly. The melody's recurring theme is brought back, while the tempo, and mood of the song is constantly varied, and with several other instruments taking the lead, bringing their own personalities with them. Among them, a very nice pan-pipe sample, mixed in with some synth-brass sounds adding to the background. A very nice song, my only minor quibble is a slightly off-looped string sample. Apart from that, Great. Rating 7. Knulla Kux, by Moby Atz : I picked this one out, because it's a guitar based song, which actualy sounds pretty good. actualy sounds pretty good. What a refreshing change! Unlike many Amiga guitar songs, the composer in this instance has recognised that the guitar is only part of the overall sound in a piece of music. So what we've got here is basically a regular, pretty good tune, with a sizable measure of rhythm and solo guitaring thrown in as well. A particular bit of inspiration was using a pitch sliding string sample to complement the sound of the guitar. It sounds unlikely, but the two samples suit each other well. Quite a large song, with many tempo changes, and a great main guitar theme. Rating 7. Į Ooo San Geun : It's an oldy but a goodie, or so the expression goes. I've got this tune on a disk called "Golden Stars top 20", which was released several years ago, and although I'm not as impressed with it as I was when I first heard it, it stands the test of time pretty well. One thing this track certainly is, is lively, and fast (Okay, two things) The rhythm behind it is based on a standard sort of drum/bass combination, of drum/bass combination, with string stabs frantically trying to keep up with the electric piano as it shoots up and down W a mountain of scales, banging out a nice little melody on the way. The string stabs, and the electric piano go topgether perfectly, holding the songs atmoshpere intact throughout. Old samples, but then again it's an old song, so I won't hold that against it. Rating 5. Punchline, by Enforcer : The intro to this song is great, with a rather dramatic echoy vocal "Public Enemy" sample, and some very dark string chords, it suddenly, and explosively (with explosion samples) launches into a really funky bassline, with some excellently sampled drums thrown in for good measure. The lead instrument started out as a brass sample which wasn't quite in tune. Oh no not again, it seems that about 1 in every 5 disks I get seems to have songs which are brutaly murdered by crap brass samples. Fourtunatly, in this case, after a few bars the brass sample was played a few octaves higher, which made it sound quite good. In fact it's really had fun with, making all sorts of silly noises with it. The tone of the song seems to be "Fun", and and it it, but the bits with the lower-octave brass sample ruins it, and drags the mark down. Rating 4. Street Jungle, by Heartbeat : Here's another piece with a nice intro, but slightly dodgy middle bits. Starting with a slow bass and synth rhythm, it slowly speed, and is joined by a great Japanese flute sample; this in turned is shadowed by a string sample, creating an atmosphere of utter tranquility. The problem arises when the song goes into it's little breaks, and some sort of piano sample takes over. A drum beat comes in, and the pianos fast and hectic melody will no way fit with the slow and tranquil flute. So the tune becomes a little disjointed, it's like two seperate pieces of music battling for the sound channels. If you ignore all the bits with the fast piano parts in, it's a great mellow tune. Rating 4. Compositions 16 songs, all from diferent origins, some good, some bad. Thankfully there's nothing here that really sucks, although "Red Dwarf", a conversion of Red Dwarf's theme tune does come pretty close. There's no really new songs, infact a lot of the songs are a few years old. Most of them are quite listnable, that's the main thing. Rating 5. Samples - Not bad at all, obviously the age of some of the songs reflect the age of the samples, so nothing spanking new, but I didn't hear any really bad samples, the odd click, or buzz on a few, but a pretty good standard otherwise. Rating 6. Presentation Apart from the rather large loading time, because of various IFF screens, and an animation of a disk, the menu screen is a fairly standard, press F-key for your choice of songs, although with sixteen songs, there's also press CTRL-F-Keys for you choice of song as well. It's a bit wierd that with some of the songs you have to press Escape to exit, and with others you www press CTRL-C. PASS They actually managed to get one wrong as well; there I was wildly pressing escape as I was told, when I should of pressed Return, which I eventually worked out for myself. On the plus side though, the system does support two drives, you'd be surprised at the numbers of two diskers that don't. Rating 5. So far it's looking like a pretty okay music compilation, and it is, most of the songs are quite reasonable, and some are pretty good. I just feel it's a bit of a con where some of the songs come from, I think there's four or five tracks which are off CU Amiga, or Amiga Computing cover disks, so if you've been collecting these magazines for the past few years, you're going to recognise quite a few of the songs. There's also a rip from Super Cars, which is an ancient game, and game music ripping is all a bit old hat these days isn't it. However, not everyone collects CU Amiga, and Amiga Computing, and the songs are all pretty good, so these disks are well worth ago, I'm sure most people will find something they like. Rating 5. AM/FM
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