For children, and adults, a way to paint a tune
Article Abstract:
Voyager's $40 Making Music multimedia CD-ROM lets users who know nothing of musical notation create their own compositions, and its straightforwardness makes it easy to explore the bounds of creativity. The music is composed of colored lines, with color indicating the instrument in use, vertical placement corresponding to pitch, height representing volume, and width indicating duration. A paintbrush lets users add notes at will, while a palette offers choices between instruments, voices or chirps. Users can create their own scale or choose chromatic, major or minor scales. A Mix and Match module lets users meld rhythm, melody and instruments at will. Games, which are quite sophisticated at the higher levels, let users match tunes or identify differences such as a tune that is faster, slower, higher or lower than the original. Users can employ traditional notation to compose in other modules. Sound quality is poor on the PC version.
Publication Name: The New York Times
Subject: Business, general
ISSN: 0362-4331
Year: 1995
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Have bugs, will deliver (Help! Help!)
Article Abstract:
Viewpoint Datalabs International's Liveart98 lets users customize three-dimensional models of mundane clip art, but it contains significant bugs. Several thousand models are available on CD-ROM, and a built-in search engine lists a range of possibilities for each entry. Adjusting the 3-D models's position on the screen and altering their stylization through shadowing and different colors can yield interesting results. The program can require hours of tinkering to operate on a computer, if it works at all. Viewpoint lists a number of bugs on its Web site and promises to correct them on updates. The company attributes some of the bug problems to Microsoft's OLE, DirectX and OpenGL, all of which a Viewpoint official considered flawed. Liveart98, which operates independently or from within Microsoft Office 97 applications, costs around $90.
Publication Name: The New York Times
Subject: Business, general
ISSN: 0362-4331
Year: 1998
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Pursuing virtual dinosaurs: alive on your screen
Article Abstract:
Two new CD-ROM-based children's educational software packages based on the study of dinosaurs are reviewed. Teramedia's $40 Devils Canyon: A Dinomation Adventure is ostensibly designed to impart information about paleontology and geography, but tends to be overwhelmed by a cluttered and confusing interface. Also marring the appeal of this software is a spate of rhetoric about goal completion and a garbled presentation about virtual reality. A better product is DK Multimedia's $30 Eyewitness Virtual Reality: Dinosaur Hunters, which is loaded with useful information about dinosaurs. Again, however, a poorly-designed interface and a basic metaphor based on a cluttered and dark Victorian-era museum detract from the product's appeal.
Publication Name: The New York Times
Subject: Business, general
ISSN: 0362-4331
Year: 1996
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