###

####

                                             REVIEW: DANNY AMOR'S "DA CAPO" CD-ROM VOLUME 1
                    Kane Peterson                                                                                                                               kanep@mcs.com

Da Capo is a 575 megabyte collection of music modules (mods), instruments and other music programs and utilities for the Amiga. "So what?", you might ask, "There are plenty of other CD-roms available that have similar programs and content." There are a few things that stand Da Capo apart from these other CD collections. First, Da Capo is designed for Amiga users. It has icons for all the programs contained on it, so everything can be clicked on from Workbench. The windows are positioned to appear at the correct size to hold all their contents. Second, it contains ready to run programs on the CD. It encompasses every music editor, mod-player, and music utility that I know about on the Amiga. Programs to note are: a full version of OctaMED 4 (mod editor), AmiSOX (sound converter utility), Play16 (WAVE, AIFF and AU sound player), DSound (IFF-8SVX sound player), and EaglePlayer (mod player). Also included are Workbench 3.x datatypes (AIFF, AU, VOC and WAVE) for supporting audio formats on other platforms, a demo version of OctaMED v6.0, and various audio CD-Rom players. Also on Da Capo are directories of instrument files already converted into IFF, WAVE, AIFF, VOC and AU format. For all formats you will find samples of drums, guitars, speech, fx and more. According to the author, there are over 2,000 instrument samples in each sound format. If you are like me, the music that is included on Da Capo is of most interest to you. This, I am happy to report, is what I liked most about Da Capo. I have listened to other mod CD collections like: 'The Ultimate MOD Collection', 'Town of Tunes' and mods on the 'Aminet' CDs, however, my largest criticism with these collections is that most of the mods fall under the 'techno' music category. That is, songs with just a heavy beat and a bunch of speech samples strung together. I'm not trying to pick on this music style (I, in fact, like techno music), but I find many of these mods to be boring and unoriginal. Da Capo has seem to step away from this and offer a more complete range of music. I have only listened to a small percentage of the 1,400+ mods on the disk, but many of them I have liked so far. Already, I can tell that there has been more music on this CD alone that I like, than what I have found on the other mod collections that I have listened to. Lastly, as extra added bonus to this CD, a real audio track with the song "I Love You" by Gabriel Seher is included on the disc. You can pop Da Capo into your compact disc player and listen to it as well. Da Capo gets a definite thumbs up! Da Capo is available from Amiga Library Services. (info@amigalib.com)