Article: MOTU Digital Performer v2.11 (March 1998)

[supernova777]

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/mar98/articles/digitalperf.html

Nearly two years after everybody else jumped on the Power Mac audio bandwagon, Mark of the Unicorn have finally come on board with their flagship sequencer, which will now record and play back audio without the need for external hardware. Has it been worth the wait? DEREK JOHNSON finds out

Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer is certainly a member of one of the top four Macintosh sequencing families -- the others being Steinberg's Cubase, Emagic's Logic, and Opcode's Vision -- but a maverick streak at the company means that it has always stood slightly apart. There are two reasons for this: firstly, MOTU have not grasped the Opcode-originated Open Music System (OMS) in the same way as many MIDI software developers. Instead they've ploughed ahead with their own FreeMIDI system, which achieves basically the same goal, in a slightly different way, routing MIDI data from the outside world to the sequencer and back, via a MIDI interface (simple or multi-port) attached to your Mac's serial port(s). In addition, it provides a certain amount of inter-application communication within the computer itself (such as with MOTU's editor/librarian Unisyn). Successive versions of FreeMIDI have enhanced its compatibility with OMS, but it still retains its own particular flavour.