RBF SUCKS!
Kizzume
every year since '98! It's pathetic.
MED v1.0-v1.5 have had major latancy problems (there's even a delay from
the time you hit a key and hear the note), absolutely minimal midi
support (when you save as a midi file, there are no volume changes saved
in the file, no slides, no vibrato, etc.. and it doesn't even save the
instrument preferences--well, the instrument number since the bank
option doesn't work at all), there is no save as MOD option--you can
only save as MED and severely crippled midi formats, and when using the
option to hear the notes that have been entered as you manually scroll
through the song block, the polyphony slowly starts cutting out until
you only have 2 notes polyphony and can't even hear the notes you're
entering (but the "play song" mode still works fine) until you save the
song, quit and reload MED, and reload the song until the polyphony gets
too bad again. It also continually has issues with slowdowns, no matter
how fast your machine is, unless you run the program in the background
so you can't see the text scrolling.
Their v1.5 is absolute rubbish. It requires twice the memory, twice the
processor, and is not stable at all in windows '98 without at least
256mb ram (we're talking bluescreen). The only things they changed in
v1.5 is finally getting rid of the pause that's usually there just when
you first start playing the song, they added help balloons (oh boy, how
about clippy next), and they turned the bass up on an equalizer that you
can't adjust. Like I said, it's absolute rubbish.
Andy, the sole programmer for MED, has never made any comments himself
about bugs or problems with med when people ask in MED support groups
and message boards--he leaves it all to Ray who can only say is that
either he's going to make an announcement soon or that v2 is coming
soon. Everything is "soon." Andy doesn't feel he has to be responsible
for his own programming, and Ray, the owner of RBF software, refuses to
let ANYONE touch his "precious little baby" except Andy, even though
Andy is either too busy or isn't feeling well enough to do any work on
it. The concept of open source will never pass by Ray's thick skull.
If MED had been made open source, it would probably have blown away all
the rest of the trackers by now and would be on multiple platforms. Ray
is even disallowing people to work on other platforms (Linux, MacOS)
until he's done with v2, which will probably never come out. What a
shame. At the rate they've been going, they'll have v1.6, v1.7, v1.8,
v1.9, v1.91, v1.92, v1.93, etc.., but never v2, and charge for every
third version.
They actually want to charge people to upgrade from v1.4 to v1.5 for
help balloons and less compatibility! It's CRAZY!! RBF does not seem to
know what they're doing, and I imagine that Teijo, the original
programmer of the EXCELLENT amiga versions, is probably ashamed to have
such an irrisponsible group of people take over his well-written project.
If ever you thought about trying Med Soundstudio, try Renoise instead.
It's solid, it uses vst plugins, has full midi support, has virtually no
latancy, contains standard professional studio options (sync, etc)--it's
a gem. www.renoise.com