Canam Quartz

This new French program must be one of the cheapest ways of integrating digital audio and MIDI sequencing. Panicos Georghiades and GABRIEL JACOBS put it through its paces.

The latest in a series of similar cheap packages appearing at the moment, Quartz is a PC program that integrates MIDI and digital audio recording and playback. Its price makes it an entry‑level piece of software, and in terms of features it is indeed in that category. However, you can do quite a lot with it, and depending on your requirements, it could prove to be all you need.

On The Surface

The program is very simple to use — if you've used other software sequencers before, and if you're familiar with Windows, it shouldn't take you more than an hour or two to get up and running with Quartz. The 50‑page manual explains all menus and windows, and includes a section on MIDI basics, but you hardly need to read it to use the program.

Quartz's screen layouts follow standard Windows conventions. The menu bar has the normal File, Edit, Options, Windows and Help menus, as well as specialised ones such as Tracks, Control and Cues. However, the manual incorrectly states that the program uses the Windows MDI (Multiple Document Interface) in exactly the same way as Word for Windows, the File Manager, and many other applications. MDI means that you can load and edit more than one document at the same time, but Quartz doesn't actually allow you to load more than one song at once. This isn't the end of the world, and in actual fact, few music programs adhere to MDI — but why make inaccurate claims? There are a few other incorrect statements in the manual, which hasn't been updated to reflect certain features of the program.

Getting Pistes

Quartz is in fact three programs in one: the main sequencer program, a soundcard mixer, and a wave editor.

The main program is a 32‑track sequencer. Tracks here are called 'Pistes' (as Quartz is French) and, unlike most other sequencers, this one doesn't give you what is called a track sheet. Instead, you get a tracks mixer, which we'll come to in detail in a moment. Quartz has many windows, three of which are the most important:

• The Control window is where you find the transport controls to play, record, stop, fast forward, and so on, as well as buttons and settings for a number of other parameters. There's a text box that shows the selected active track, while two digital counters display the positions of a pair of locators. These are used for functions such as loop playback, and their positions can be edited on the screen simply by clicking on them. Another pair of counters shows the present position in the song in elapsed time, as well as in bars, beats and clock ticks. Time signature and tempo are also set in this window. Time signatures can have numerators between 1 and 16, and denominators of 2, 4, 8 or 16, while tempo can vary between 60 and 240 bpm.
• The Master Mixer window contains three faders — two for MIDI and one for wave audio. Quartz can control up to two MIDI ports, each having 16 channels. These could be two soundcards, or an internal soundcard and an external MIDI instrument setup, for example. For each MIDI port, there's a master fader, and mute and solo buttons.
• The Tracks Mixer window looks and behaves very much like a normal audio mixing desk. Up to eight tracks can be controlled and seen at any one time (if your screen resolution is high enough — we got eight at 800 x 600 pixels). To view other tracks, you scroll right or left of this window.

For each track in this mixer, there's a track name and number and an instrument sound name. The latter can be selected from a dialogue box containing preset lists for General MIDI, as well as for specific synths, including the Roland MT32 and D110, Korg M1, Emu Proteus, and Kurzweil K1000. There are settings for muting, soloing, transposing (over a maximum of plus or minus 24 semitones), MIDI channel and port (A1 to A16 and B1 to B16), and two faders: a vertical one for volume, and a horizontal one for panning. Movements of these two faders can be recorded, and played back automatically. In addition, each track has an attractive VU meter showing volume variations. Clicking the right mouse button over this display brings up a pop‑up menu with options to show other windows containing information about that track — such as the MIDI event list and piano roll (called a grid here) windows, and the Score and Controller windows (see below).

A Quick Look Through The Windows

The program's other windows are all worth at least a brief mention:

• The Event window is where recordings are represented as simple lists of MIDI events in time (bars/beats/clock ticks).
• The Cues window displays a list of markers that you set in the current song. Each marker has a name, comments and position in bars, beats, and clock ticks.
• The Keyboard window is a piano‑like graphic which displays notes during music playback. You can also use it for auditioning sounds and recording. It's worth noting that you can also use your computer keyboard to input notes, instead of a MIDI keyboard, for those times when you're too lazy to switch all your equipment on. A Velocity list box allows volume adjustment (O to 127) of notes played with your computer keyboard.
• The Arranger window displays the list of parts which make the current arrangement. Each part has an index, a start position, an end position, and comments. You build an arrangement by defining a sequence of parts to be played one after the other. You can create up to 32 parts.
• The Juke Box window displays the list of music files which can be played in a batch. Up to 32 files can be included, though they have to be Quartz files — you can't include MIDI files in this list.
• The Score window displays the active track in standard music notation. The number of bars displayed will depend on the score quantisation value selected, but the window is, in any case, automatically updated when the music is played. You can also get a printout of the current track in notation format. Though Quartz does have these scoring facilities, we'd stress that scoring is not a strong point of the program — don't expect to print orchestral scores with it. As with some other windows, you can use the program's Edit Tools icons here to perform operations on events (see box on Editing Tools elsewhere in this article).
• The Grid window shows track contents in the traditional piano roll format, with notes represented as horizontal thin bars whose length indicates note duration and whose vertical position indicates pitch. If you select the Master Track instead of one of the 32 MIDI tracks in the Grid window, you'll be able to see the arrangement of the digital audio files in your composition. Here, specific notes represent specific WAV files (assigned by you). The window is automatically updated when the music is played, and you can adjust the zoom in/out value of the grid. Again, you can use the program's tools to edit notes.
• Finally, the Controllers window shows graphs representing the recorded values of MIDI Controller information like pitch bend and aftertouch; using the mouse, you can draw over the existing values to alter them.

Sync'Ing Waves

One of Quartz's strengths is the ability to sync a stereo digital audio track (in the form of WAV files) to a MIDI sequence. The program has a sub‑directory called Waves where you copy all the WAV files you wish to use.

The program loads the contents (just the names — not the actual data) of the sound files in a list, and you assign these to specific notes; assignments can be saved to disk. Digital audio is dealt with by a special track called the Master Track. Notes on this track play digital audio files rather than MIDI, and these files are loaded and played at run‑time — they're not pre‑loaded into RAM. Other programs work in this way, but with Quartz you can alter the pan position and playback volume of sound files from within the sequencer (more or less as you do with MIDI notes) which is very handy. The manual states that you can alter volume via the motorised faders, as on MIDI tracks, but this hadn't been implemented in the version we received.

The waveform file editor is very basic and is memory‑based, so you can't handle large files. There are cut and paste, volume change, mix and echo functions — nothing sophisticated. In fact, it's only slightly better than the Windows Sound Recorder. But there's also a mixer utility for MIDI, digital audio and CD audio to handle soundcard settings.

It's worth noting here that Quartz can send out MIDI clock sync, but can't accept sync, so it can only act as a Master if you wish to synchronise to other equipment.

Conclusions

Despite our sprinkling of criticisms, there's no doubt that Quartz is very good value for money. It's a beginner's product which is pretty to look at, easy to use, and capable of handling digital audio quite well if you're not very demanding. In fact, we only have one major complaint: the program shouldn't have been named Quartz (or at least, the version we received shouldn't have been). Quartz is a crystal used in modern watches to keep accurate time, but the early‑release version of this program we received had problems with keeping the right tempo when playing some of the files we imported, a potentially serious shortcoming for this type of program. We contacted the manufacturers, who assured us that this will be sorted out in the full release product. We hope it will, because this is a program which deserves to do well. Nevertheless, do check before you buy that this problem has been rectified, as a sequencer that cannot keep time is not, on the whole, going to be much use to you!