Product Review - MOTU BPM : July 2009
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information £299 including VAT.Musictrack +44 (0)1767 313447. $295.MOTU +1 617 576 2760. November 2009
| Product Review - MOTU BPMArticle Preview :: Virtual Groovebox [Mac/PC]Published in SOS July 2009 Reviews : Software: Sequencers+DAWs MOTU’s BPM takes some obvious cues from Akai’s MPC range — but can a groovebox work in software?
You know how it is with beat production workstations: you wait ages for one, and then two come along at once. In the last issue of SOS we looked at Native Instruments Maschine, and this month it’s the turn of MOTU’s BPM. Like Maschine, BPM provides a dedicated environment for playing, sequencing and arranging drums, loops and other sampled instruments. Both NI and MOTU have taken hardware drum machines and Akai’s MPCs as inspiration, but while Maschine is focused around its own dedicated hardware controller, BPM is software only, running either as a stand-alone app or an MAS, RTAS, AU or VST plug-in. It’s compatible with both Mac OS 10.4 or higher and Windows XP and Vista. First Impressions
BPM’s user interface is of the photo-realistic hardware variety, defaulting to a 4x4 pad layout with a pattern sequencing matrix displayed on a virtual screen above it. The screen has various editing, mixing and arrangement modes, which can be selected from a strip of buttons to its right. More buttons switch the panel between four banks of drums, or re-focus the pads to Scene selection in BPM’s Live mode. Clicking the Rack A or B buttons replaces the pad display with a mini-rack of sampler modules. A browser column gives access to BPM’s 15GB factory library, other UVI sound banks and your computer’s regular filing system. Tabs provide shortcuts to different categories of sounds: Kit+Pattern combos, Kits, Patterns, Loops, Samples, Instruments and User. Only the factory sound bank can be browsed via these specific categories; everything else is accessed via the User tab. You can create Favourite directories within the User tab, but this is not as slick as Maschine’s tag-based browser, which displays your own files in its main categories. However, BPM makes up for this by letting you drag and drop files from the desktop. You can, for example, drag samples straight onto pads, loops straight to Rack devices, and MIDI files to the piano-roll sequencer. A more significant advantage is that BPM loads patterns and kits independently of one another, whereas Maschine always overwrites patterns when a new kit is loaded. ...
Published in SOS July 2009 
| Sunday 8th November 2009 November 2009
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