Sunnyvale, Calif., May 26, 2000 – Quadmation is now shipping v 5.6 of its PlayerPRO "tracker" musical utility. Included with the full version are 4000 song files, 500 instruments, other shareware music programs, full documentation, plus a development kit for MacOS, Windows 95/NT, BeOS. A free shareware version is also available

Player Pro Notation Editor (click for larger view)

Trackers are programs that generate music files called MODs. The MOD originated on the Amiga system, but quickly gained popularity, and now, software packages are available on almost every platform to compose and play these files. However, on the Macintosh, there are very few good trackers.

A MOD file is significant, as it is a totally self-contained music file with a reasonable file size. It was intended originally as a compact way of storing background music for games and demonstration programs, but it has since grown to become a favorite file format for online music exchange. There are literally thousands of MODs available in the public domain, and they can be found on the Internet, AOL, and almost any good BBS (for a few sites where you can get MODs, check out the Player Pro links page).

Each MOD file contains two sections: patterns and samples. Patterns are the equivalent of a score for the conductor. Each pattern tells the computer what notes to play, how loud to play them, and just about everything else that can be done with a note. The samples are actual recordings of the musical instruments used to play the songs. Through a number of mathematical formulas, the computer can adjust the pitch and volume of the samples to make music.

PlayerPRO is a full-fledged composition tool. With many editing modes, including a block mode, digital view, and a traditional score view of the music, PlayerPRO has tools simple enough for a novice but robust enough to keep even the most technically advanced musician satisfied.

Player Pro Wave Viewer (click for larger image)

Many ways of entering music are also supported. The mouse can be used to click notes on to a score, which resembles any sheet music that you would find. The program can record notes from your MIDI keyboard. Record one note at a time or in real time, and you can see your music appear as you play. PlayerPRO can convert the keys pressed on your keyboard into musical notes, and you can even play chords by holding down more than one key simultaneously.

PlayerPRO is also capable of playing and importing almost any music file that you can find. Unlike most programs, which either work with MIDI files or sampled files, PlayerPRO can deal with both.

It supports different sound file formats as samples as well, including the majority of popular Windows, Macintosh, and Unix file formats. It's hard to find a music file that PlayerPro doesn't support.

Source: Quadmation
Web: www.quadmation.com