The Mixdown hardware looks unimpressive: a flat case about 8' x 6' featuring cable connectors for the Amiga's serial and parallel ports, and a number of MIDI In, Out and Thru sockets. A July release is planned, and on the version we looked at, the software was 90% complete, with hardware finished save for a temporary case. Designed by the same developers, Music Sales, Mixdown takes the concept to limits which only the Amiga could allow. The Mixdown system owes a good deal to the Commodore Sound Sampler and FM Voice Module for the CBM64. It can be a complete sampling, FM synthesis and MIDI composition workstation, to use a popular phrase. Using Mixdown, the Amiga becomes more than a computerised musical box. Its central processor is the fast, powerful 68000, as used in the Apple Macintosh and Atari ST, and it has three special chips which handle data transfer, graphics and sound.Īlthough the data handling and graphics are stunning (ten times the speed of an IBM PC, 4096 colours, multi-tasking of eight simultaneous jobs, full window/icon/mouse interface and so on), it's what the Amiga sounds like that should interest musicians. The Amiga is not to be confused with the IBM PC lookalikes which it so closely resembles physically. There's an £1800 version available with an extra disk drive. This system consists of a central 512K processor unit with built-in disk drive, detachable keyboard, colour monitor and mouse. The Amiga, as most of you will know from previous E&MM features, is a high-end home/low-end business machine, recently launched in the UK at around £1500 for the basic system. With the advent of the Mixdown Music System for the Amiga, we may soon have to examine our definition of 'computer music', too. Without question, the concept of the 'home computer' has had to be redefined with the advent of Commodore's Amiga PC.

Amiga speech synthesizer online