LISTEN
MIKE DES CHENES
MUSIC COMPOSER COLUMN

Thanks to our resident programmer, we can now enter some of our Music Composer compositions with ease. The Music Decomposer program listed below allows us to list music in our pages that can be easily typed in by you. In this issue, we have included the printout for:

Yellow Submarine.......

MUSIC DE-COMPOSER by Charles Bachand

They say that Necessity is the Mother of Invention. It is even more so when you contribute to a computer magazine and want to submit a program that is for all intents and purposes unprintable. I am referring to the melodious files generated by the now famous Music Composer cartridge.

To share the music of life with a close friend would mean giving him or her a cassette or diskette containing the music files, with the instructions "Listen and enjoy". But in order to share a melody with the rest of the world, or at least those wise enough to subscribe to A.N.A.L.O.G., the musical notes have to be transcribed back to paper. This can be done in one of two ways. Either you can try to read all those notes that you entered into Music Composer, which is bound to lead to errors, or you can run the BASIC program known as MUSIC DE-COMPOSER.

This program will print everything you would want to know about a music program. I came across the idea for MUSIC DE-COMPOSER while reading the documentation for ATARI's Music Composer. Pages 14-15 of the manual were the most informative. They listed the formats in which music is saved. What a nice thing to include in a manual, it could come in handy later on! Immediately following this section was a program to list music files. But the excitement died when I realized that the program only printed the byte values of the file. What good is that? There has to be a better way, and that way is with MUSIC DE-COMPOSER.

MUSIC DE-COMPOSER produces a music program listing from which anyone can type his or her music into their computers. The formats and symbolism are the same ones used by the Music Composer cartridge. If you think that you are another Bach, feel free to run MUSIC DECOMPOSER and share your music with the rest of the world.

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