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Posted by: Levon River Sun 22 Dec 2002, 08:19

Well, it seems that this was the quietest non-release release so far in OS X that I know of:

http://nav.440network.com/out.php?mmsc=forums&url=http://store.yahoo.com/cakewalkdirect/metro6upgrades.html

Apparently registered owners of Metro 5 and Metro SE are now able to purchase 6.0 (with OS X support) as an upgrade through 12 January 2003. I guess that's going to be the "official" public release date. (?) Any registered Metro users out there who've made the jump?

Posted by: gidfiddler Thu 9 Jan 2003, 08:06

yes i made the leap as the upgrade price is $200 cheaper . a bargain at that price $119 us .. i had a copy of metro from years ago that was thrown in with a roland um2 midi port and used this to achieve the upgrade .

. i haven't had a close look at it .
and as with any daw there is a lot to learn .
but what I have seen so far looks good .configured recorded no problems via a motu 828, midi editing looks fantastic .
and my two emails to Jeremy Sagan the developer where answered with 5 minutes . this application is a one man band it seems which is great you actually get replies from THE author . it has been around for years cakewalk bought it and now Jeremy has it back .
thereis an online help system built into the application which works well .

I am sure that this will be a good tool even if later i get the dp3 upgrade .

Posted by: Levon River Thu 9 Jan 2003, 14:01

Yes. I used Metro several years ago when it was MIDI-only and sold as a companion to Deck by OSC, the original company that created both of them. It had MIDI editing features and conventions that I liked a lot.

Which I'm really glad to hear. Those guys who developed Metro and Deck were always very responsive, and seemed very user-oriented, dedicated to providing a good and useful product at a fair price. That's a golden combination.

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to Metro's release. With audio unit support, we could suddenly find ourselves looking at a real contender in the ring. I'll be getting DP's OS X offering regardless, because I've got many projects sitting half-finished in DP's pipeline, and am too ornery to finish them in OS 9.

Give us a fuller report after you really take Metro for a test drive, will ya'?

Posted by: gidfiddler Thu 9 Jan 2003, 15:10

www.sagantech.biz/metro/products.shtml

the demo is fully active . just shuts down every now and then .

I bought it for 2 reasons .
1.it works for os x now and it was cheap
I had metro 4 thrown in with a roland um2 I purchased years ago I never used it (the manual is a little intimidating ). so in affect it cost me $119 just the upgrade . without the upgrade it is $319 which I could not justify, as unless metro is incredible I will go dpx from dp3 so there is no way I would pay the full price for metro and afford that dp3 upgra de as well.
nevertheless it may prove to be better than dp in some way and i can also have a 2nd computer set up to use it . and besides which it is here now . i hated the whole oms free midi oms emulation issues in os 9 , it drove me crazy , and ok you master all that & 3 months later dpx is released (well sometime soon anyway) and you are wasting money on plugins for dp3 cause they won't work for dpx ,
core midi is so much better simpler apple real got that right . i just hope some releases the equivalent of sound diver for x . or some kind of decent patch editor that one can name and save patches from any midi device . cause that is the only thing that os 9 had over X in midi as far as i was concerned . my midi device is a gr30 guitar synth there is a patch editor but only works with oms . so must run dp3 with oms or oms emulation what a pain all those layers beforeyou even get to make music .
I decided that i could be more productive elsewhere and i'd just wait for audio to catch up on os x . well it has taken a while but metro seemed like a good start .



2,it hass fantastic support for sound fonts . I am also using sibelius but sibelus only allows you to load one bank at a time via the quicktime musical instrument prefs . so if you have a sound in one bank you like and another sound in a different bank you cannot access them both similtaneously in sibelius but with metro you can . you just select them . in the midi editor it is totally easy (no notation editing though )
i am very excited about sound fonts are fantastic there are hundreds of banks out there to download and some of them sound quite good to my ears . (with simplesynth you can play them in real time via a midi controller) and some of them sound great to me your only limitation is your processors power . latency when playing them via mid controller did not seem an issue . i think soon enough people will just turn up for gigs with power book and midi controller and just use sound fonts as there instrument sounds. with every update jaguar support for them improves .

howevet basically i am a hobbyist and at present time I have many non musical activities keeping me busy so it is going to be a while before i get a chance to have a close look at metro . so i suggest you try the download if your really keen .as it may be a while before i get the oppurtunity to explore metro properly . www.sagantech.biz/metro/products.shtml
if any body wants to create a yahoo user group and share there metro user tips I'm keen .

p.s there has just been a "g4 update" to metro 6.02 presume this means it takes advantage of altivec for processing . i'll ask the developer and post .

Posted by: Levon River Thu 9 Jan 2003, 15:39

Thanks for that, gidfiddler.

Yes, the OMS/FreeMIDI mess is something I think we'd all be glad to attend the funeral for.

Your report on Metro's support for soundfonts is very heartening. I think soundfonts are one of the most underrated things around the audio world. Must be a snob factor or something, but I have some free soundfonts that I wind up picking over some Akai patches every time. It's just a matter of how the samples were made and how well it was all programmed. With the NN-XT's editing capabilities in Reason, you can tweak the things any way you want once you load them in there, including features not even supported in soundfonts.

Speaking of Reason, I don't see ReWire support featured on the Metro page. With Reason's popularity, I hope that is something that is coming soon. But soon as I clear the decks here a little bit and get these pesky clients out of my hair I'll take Metro for a spin and see what she'll do.

Things are gettin' interesting again.

Posted by: metachor Thu 9 Jan 2003, 23:25

Both AU and VST support... and 1/3 price of Logic. Smells like a winner, or at least a contender.

In a quick glance, the demo looks good. I dl'd a beta demo of metro 6 a while back and it did not run well. But this version recognized my usb audio device (did not do so in the beta) and made noises and other things I expect a DAW to do.

As gidfiddler said: there is a lot to learn before I can do anything productive with the demo to judge how it really swings against the heavy-hitters.

Here's to an alternative(affordable) os X music-making solution!

Posted by: Levon River Fri 10 Jan 2003, 00:18

Ayup, Metachor--and now it seems the real thang is shipping hot from the Sagan Technology store, under "Software":

http://nav.440network.com/out.php?mmsc=forums&url=http://www.sagantech.biz/acart/agora.cgi

Looks like that demands a new topic...

Posted by: centipedex Fri 10 Jan 2003, 03:49

So what do you need to have to be eligable for the upgrade? I just bought a Midisport Uno for $40 which actually came with Metro 5. It did not come with a Metro 5 serial number though. Would I still be able to buy the upgrade to 6?

Posted by: Levon River Fri 10 Jan 2003, 04:30

I sure dunno, centipedex. Since Cakewalk is offering the upgrade through 12 January, I imagine you'd have to contact them and ask them, PDQ.

Here's the Contact page for them:

http://nav.440network.com/out.php?mmsc=forums&url=http://store.yahoo.com/cakewalkdirect/info.html

Good luck with it.

Posted by: gidfiddler Fri 10 Jan 2003, 04:40

I used the registration card that came with my copy of metro 4 .
you have to register your copy of metro 4/5 with cakewalk first . you can do this online .
then as you fill in the webforms to buy upgrade cakewalk shop checks the serial # on this card against their database .

if you bought a legit copy of metro there will be a rego # for it somewhere . few years ago they were practically giving metro away . this was when everyone thought apple was finished . thats when I picked up mine .

good luck gid fiddler

Posted by: BusError Fri 10 Jan 2003, 10:30

Note that the LE version might be quite useful as an 'extra tool' and is $60 only.

However, I tested it a bit (I never used Metro before) and there are some quirks that annoys me; like having the 'default' button to the left of dialogs :-) and a few others. I'm gonna play the demo a little to see if it grows on me.

Posted by: BusError Fri 14 Feb 2003, 03:12

I gave it another shot (at the LE demo version, anyway). It's true it's seems to have lots of potential, but dammit, the interface is absolutly awful.

Is there a way to use a control surface with it? I have that EZbus with lots of gizmos to push and turn, but I can't seem to be able to use it in Metro.

But then again, it took me 15 minutes to find how to direct the MIDI out to my synth so... ;-/

Posted by: garysome1 Fri 14 Feb 2003, 05:37

Yep you can use controllers with it though it requires you do a fair amount to set it up:

http://nav.440network.com/out.php?mmsc=forums&url=http://www.sagantech.biz/metro/help/Met00279.htm

Hope it helps,
Gary

Posted by: BusError Fri 14 Feb 2003, 20:09

Hmm I tried that, it's rpetty useless; the list of controlers you can use is fixed, and they are all the "useful" ones, you can specify the one you'd typicaly assign to unused controlers gizmo. Theres also no "learn" method. And the actions are also very limited.

Disapointing!

Posted by: garysome1 Sat 15 Feb 2003, 06:08

Yep, a little disappointing and laborious. I took the time to set up for my US-428 but now I can use it. Unfortunately, Metro takes anything on the MIDI channel number (meaning it doesn't separate controller information coming in from different ports). Sagantech is really responsive to email on their forum though and I'll bet suggestions will be listened to. I have thought about suggesting improvements but just haven't gotten there yet.

I would warn folks about shunning Metro just for this alone. It does work, if not conveniently. Metro is quite the tool for the money and for a product that recently changed owners it was among the first to work in X and it has new features (AU, soundfonts, jukebox...) and it has already had several point updates. Obviously this is an agile/agressive developer!

Posted by: kaboombahchuck Tue 18 Feb 2003, 05:19

I have had no problems running muliple ports at one time on metro 5. Metro 6 is pretty mush identecal to 5..... Of course running OMS might have something to do with it.. make sure to correcly assign each port to the corect sound.

Posted by: garysome1 Tue 18 Feb 2003, 06:07

Thanks but I think I just described the issue poorly. I use 2 ports off of my US-428 (plus the controller port) and an old serial interface at the same time using OMS with no problems.

The controller problem occurs because Metro takes remote control information based on a MIDI channel but does not discern between ports for the remote control data. So, if you choose MIDI channel 1 for remote control data it will accept it from MIDI channel 1 from any port (and all ports enabled in MIDI Setup:Record From). In the case of the US-428 in "4 banks mode" (what seems most appropriate for Metro to me) you'll end up using controllers like bank select, mod wheel, pan, hold pedal, ... and if you are using these controllers on any other port with the same MIDI channel number you'll suddenly have your faders jumping around when you didn't mean it.

I guess in my case I could accept a mere 46 MIDI channels (1 channel tied up in the US-428 across all ports + 15 for port 1 + 15 for port 2 + 15 for port 3) and then it's no big deal. I just happen to have a bunch of keyboards that are 8 port multitimbral and it is convenient to have something like:
port 1, channels 1-8 for synth 1
port 1, channels 9-16 for synth 2
port 2, channels 1-8 for synth 3
...

Make sense?

Posted by: Levon River Thu 27 Feb 2003, 05:38

In some respects, I have to agree. It's a real love-hate relationship.

The part I hate most is going through about 6 steps to set up to record audio. With Deck, e.g., you select from the available inputs right on the channel strip and click the record button and go. Metro needs some streamlining, mainly to throw its complicated "Instruments" architecture out the nearest window and say, "Here's yer MIDI channels, here's yer audio channels, have a nice day."

That said, it's a very powerful program and I hope for coming greatness in simplification.

I still think its MIDI editing capabilities are excellent.

Posted by: garysome1 Thu 27 Feb 2003, 07:59

Are you using OS9/OMS? I kind of dig telling Metro to Special:Modify Instruments and Busses: "Make instruments reflect MIDI setup document." which lays things out as you have OMS already set up. If OS X I'm no help (yet) though Audio MIDI Setup seems close enough to OMS to offer a very similar option.

Posted by: BusError Fri 28 Feb 2003, 00:33

BTW I'm not in rather close contact with Jeremy, who does Metro. I've helped him some on various OSX development specifics, and he already released a new LE and has a new 6.05 non-LE on ASAP.

Posted by: Levon River Thu 6 Mar 2003, 10:25

No, garysome1, I'm a die-hard Xer. I'd rather go to my mother-in-law's than go into 9.2.x

That's how I wound up working with Metro in the first place; I've been porting over sessions from DP (which I used in 9), since "Mark of the Unicorn" turned out, in OS X, to be "Mark of the Swayback Jackass with Party Horn on Head."

I know what you mean about having "Instruments" reflect the MIDI set-up, and Metro is X-smart in that category, but it's rarely what I want in a session. I don't mean to reflect badly on Metro at all; I'm one of its ardent cheerleaders. I just think its GUI could be made a lot more intuitive, and the audio part streamlined so an audio channel is an audio channel, and not a doily that you put over your lamp and then carry into the kitchen and plug into the blender. If you get my drift.

Posted by: Levon River Thu 6 Mar 2003, 10:35

I take it you meant "now in rather close contact"?

That's great news! One thing I'll mention that would be awful nice is some GUI definition to some of the drop menus that right now appear just as text in, e.g., the graphic editor. You can't tell the difference between what is just informational text and what is hiding a clickable drop menu

That is *so* OS 7.

Little touches like that I think would go a long way toward making the program much more user friendly. Of course, I'm not a programmer, so all this is easy for *me* to *say*....