After a few weeks putting MOTU's premier software application through its paces, we unanimously agree that it deserves more than just a cursory glance when you find yourself shopping for that digital recording and sequencing package you know you're going to have to get one day.

As with all the products we recieve, supposedly designed to make your life as easy as possible by making the actual act of getting your music into a computer ready for editing and mastering, the basic features are similar to those found in other products in the same price bracket (including those which retail for up to twice as much), so expect the usual multi-functional transport control panel, editing windows and mixing console, each with their own pull-down menu which allows you to choose functions for use within that particular window.

But of all the elements within Digital Performer that make this application as good as all the rest, the one that makes life really easy is the ease and speed with which you can get down to actually recording your music, because of all the frustrating factors associated with using a computer to help make music, compared to your trusty press record and go four track, is that associated with actually immortalizing your idea before is fades into the far distance, lost because you had to open numerous separate parts of the same program just to record a few bars of MIDI or digital audio data.

MOTU's Digital Performer allows the musician to open the application, select a track to record to and hit record, although I must add at this point that we're also using another MOTU product, their Express XT as the MIDI interface between our desktop computer and the numerous sound modules and controller keyboard, but judging by the ease with which the Express XT is able to interface with all the many and varied MIDI based applications we have installed on our test-bench PC I doubt this is a contributing factor to Digital Performer's ease of use (incidentally our test-bench PC is a Macintosh, which makes life easier and much more fun for the electronic music maker right there!).

Rating - 825,066 (out of a possible 1,000,000)

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