From PC Magazine, January 1999

Autoscore Pro 2.0

By Bill Machrone

There you sit, with more computing power than it took to build the Space Shuttle, and all you care about is how fast your screen refreshes when you hit the PgDn key. I know you didn't ask Intel to build in all those MMX instructions, but now that you've got them, how about putting them to good use?

You probably have just as much (if not more) computing power at home, which is just the place to kick back and put it to work--making music. The capabilities of today's machines have really let designers cut loose with some amazing products. Here are a few of them that you can pursue at your leisure.

MIDI sequencers that will play your music and transcription programs that will write it out have been around for at least a decade. But they've required a MIDI keyboard or other digital instrument to get the notes in there, or laborious, note-at-a-time clicking and dragging with the mouse. Wouldn't it be great if you could just play the instrument of your choice, or even sing the notes, and have them show up as sheet music?

Wildcat Canyon's Autoscore does exactly that, with nothing more than a microphone plugged into your sound card. We're taught from an early age to leave music composition to the professionals, but did you ever overhear a kid at play make up words and melodies with carefree abandon? If you can recapture that youthful spontaneity, Autoscore can capture it to disk.

I tried Autoscore with an acoustic guitar, an electric bass, a piano, and my voice; each has individual idiosyncrasies, but after a few minutes' tinkering, I could see, edit, and play back a melody line from each. It's easy to overdrive the input to the sound card from an electric instrument, so you'll have to play with the level controls.

Autoscore is a pitch-recognition program, not intended for voice recognition, so your words don't show up on-screen. In fact, words will probably trip it up. The machine does much better with "la la la" and "dee dee dee." And don't expect it to record some blindingly fast arpeggio or run. Note recognition takes time. Because you're recording MIDI, you can record slowly and increase the tempo later.

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