Metro 6 Actually Shipping As Upgrade, They sure know how to keep a secret... Options

[Levon River]

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

http://store.yahoo.com/cakewalkdirect/metr...o6upgrades.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?

[gidfiddler]

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 .

[Levon River]

midi editing looks fantastic .

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.

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 .

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.

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

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'?

[gidfiddler]

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 .

[Levon River]

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.

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!

[Levon River]

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

http://www.sagantech.biz/acart/agora.cgi

Looks like that demands a new topic...

[centipedex]

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?

[Levon River]

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?

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://store.yahoo.com/cakewalkdirect/info.html

Good luck with it.

[gidfiddler]

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