Dhalang MG Reviews

amazingly diferent

excellent product! does more than it indicates! good job! well done! ~7

Has alot of promise, but still needs alot of development before ready for prime time. I was attracted to it because of the flexibility with using different scales and the ability to create your own. I'd say it succeeds in this department, but it makes the other deficiencies seem that much worse, because this would be an extremely useful piece of music software otherwise. There are several issues, but the worst one, that I feel really needs to be addressed before this is a usable product, is that signals overload and "block out" way too easily for software from the 21st Century. By this I mean, let's say you're using the Analog synth, for example. You start tweaking it out to get your sound - you then discover that only a small number of settings are actually usable because many of them cause the signal to completely overflow - it feels like a mathematical overflow where it runs away and completely clips out to the point of having no sound. This isn't something I've encountered in soft synths since the very early early days in the late 1990's. I've been making music with computers since '98-'99, and I'm confident I can find my way around any soft synth or DAW and be able to dial in good sounds, but Dhalang is confounding in that it behaves unpredictably and counter-intuitively with so many settings resulting in overflow. The result is something that appears to have many possibilities, but in reality is extremely limited in use because so many settings are unstable. Regarding other things: the piano roll works, but the looping functions behave strangely when you try to layer tracks with different loop lengths. I was getting a strange behavior where the first measure of a loop would repeat multiple times before continuing the rest of the loop, because it was shorter than loops on other tracks - I can't see any way to disable this. The sub-loop function is similarly glitchy as well, with things getting very confusing when you try to have several tracks playing at once. TouchPlay; I still don't understand what the point of this is. The Control seems to work, I got it to automate a pan control in the mixer, but its length ends up following the loops in the tracks in a weird way that I wish it didn't do (changing loop length in a track affected the loop length in the Control thing I made - I didn't want this). Vector is, I dunno, it doesn't seem like anything I would want to use if I was doing something with piano roll...just wish it wasn't there at all. Matrix; I haven't even tried at all, because it makes no intuitive sense to me and I don't know how it would be useful. Particle works and can be some fun, but it feels like an either/or situation if you're using piano roll. The documentation is poor, so alot of the more unusual functions like Vector and Matrix would require hours of me fooling with it to figure out what actually they do and how it could be musically useful. At this point in my life, I don't have the patience and just want to make music. There are many demonstration videos, but they don't actually give any instruction or explanation, it's just 15 minutes of watching someone jam with the program, not explaining anything that's happening. Again, I don't have the time or patience to sit through all these videos to try to suss out what is happening. I expect a learning curve with new software, especially when it has unusual features, but the difficulty of intuiting the more exotic features begs it to have more complete explanation.

For someone with a computer science background, it was quite interesting to try Markov chains and state machines for music generation. But the way I see it, it is more like an experiment/academic study than actual music creation: I can't really see how you can produce good music with it. But I'm a computer scientist, not a musician. The software itself offers a lot of more features to play with, different types of synths, and it supports MIDI keyboards and ASIO output - something you often miss in the Steam store music production software/games. As for synths - I've seen better, but here it's more about the variety of things to do than doing a great synth at the level of the VST plugins.

I'd say if you already have ASIO4ALL driver installed on your PC, you know there are chances to make good acquaintance with this software, which ain't especially user-friendly. The screenshots are quite explicit: every aspiring sound engineer must feel acute arousal from the oscillator envelope geometry and the promised microtonal tuning of scales. Seems to be a competent tool for writing electronic music with original interaction & visualization. Not a pro by any means, but after 2,5 hours of being astonished (with slightly impaired hearing from unexpected peaks) i figured out at last how to send my piano-roll feed into my synthesizer module #1 and successfully saved the project. Hoping to return later! It really asks for *gamification* (especially being presented on Steam) - with an achievement-based tutorial this could become a strong educational resource about the physical nature of sound vibration.