Phoenix Studio Review

January 12, 2004 | | format - Other (ar.) | viewed - 116x
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(74 votes) | category - -

Phoenix Studio Review

>A Quick General Overview of Phoenix Studio

The design of Phoenix Studio is compact. This is good for giving an overview of the settings and the musical score that is used. Contrary to what one might believe, inputting the music is not hard.

Adding tunes and drum hits is in fact very simple. Tap once to add a tone (or a hit on the drums) and tap a second time to remove it. It’s hard to make it any simpler than that. The 'knobs' for adjusting the synth parameters, are suitable for stylus use. Tap-and-drag upwards to increase or tap-and-drag downwards to decrease. The current parameter value shown clearly in the middle of the “knob”, which is a great deal of help.

Talking about help, included with Phoenix Studio is a good documentation of it. The documentation is well written and any newbie will find her-/himself well introduced by it. I did not read the documention at first, and that is no requirement for a 'successful operation'. Phoenix Studio is reminiscent of other music software for desktop PCs and users of such software will feel at home in Phoenix Studio. I will in this review include some info from the documentation simply because it describes the functions well.

At your exposal are three synthesizers, one drum, one sequencer and one mixer. You might believe that this is too much for a Pocket PC to handle, but no. Even I am amazed by it’s performance; it works great on a 206 MHz arm Processor. Add to that equation that most Pocket PCs sold today are powered by a more powerful 300 or 400 MHz processor.

The Synthesizers

Each synth can have 8x4 different tracks or patterns inside them, which are listed on the top as eight numbers and 4 heading letters of the alphabet. So totaling this, we have at our disposal of 8x4x3 or 96 different synth patterns! And that's a whole lot!

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Tweaking and creating an individual sound for each synth is possible. This is possible by turning the 'knobs' under the synth parameters. Here is an explanation of the parameters are (which is mainly from the included documentation):

Osc1 and Osc2: Allows you to set the waveform of the two oscillators. The waveform options are: Zero, Saw, Square, Triangle, Sine, PWM, White noise
Transp: Add transposing to the oscillators.
Detune: Detunes the oscillators
Mix: Mix the sounds of the two oscillators. E.g.: 0 means only oscillator 1 is heard, 255 only oscillator 2.
RingMod: Turns on ring modulation. When this is on, the mix setting is disregarded.
Bass: Lets an extra copy of the sound through a second filter without resonance and adds it to the normal sound.
Lowpass/Highpass: Adjusts the filter type.
Tune: Transposes both oscillators.
Cutoff The base filter cutoff frequency.
Reson.: Resonance filter.
EnvAmt: How much the filter envelope affects the filter cutoff.
Attack: Attack (fade-in) time for both envelopes
Decay: Decay (fade-out) time for the filter envelope
Accent: Power of the Accent step attribute

With this many parameters to tweak and adjust, one can create any kind of masterpiece with an individual sound.

The Drum Machine

The drum is not an exception of having 8x4 patterns, and I believe that it is adequate for the mobile musician.

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However, unlike the synths, you can change the drum samples by tapping on the drum’s name and then tapping on a sample in the sample list and finally tapping on “Replace selected drum”. Tapping on the “X” will unload the sample from the selected drum.

It it also possible to add own samples to the list. This has to be a 16-bit 44.1khz mono standard .WAV file which is copied to the Phoenix Studio program folder on your Pocket PC. I would have liked the possibility of changing the synths’ samples also, and I believe that there are many others wishing the same. Maybe we will see it in a future upgrade?

The Mixer

Alright, lets now do some serious mixing here… The mixer consists of four channels; the three synths and the drum. The mixer has got one distortions unit per channel, one delay and one reverb.

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The cannel parameters are (FYI: again primarily from the documentation):

Panning: The top-most slider moves the sound between the left and right speakers. This is for when one’s using headphones as most Pocket PCs only have a mono speaker.
Volume: The big vertical slider sets the volume of this channel.
Delay: This is the amount of sound from this channel that will be sent to the delay unit.
Distort: This is a per-channel sound distortion unit, where:
Drive: controls the amount of distortion
Color: is an experimental parameter which changes the sound a bit

There are, as you can see, more parameters to set on the same tab:

Delay: Adjust the panning of the delayed sound, the feedback amount (amount of sound that is delayed again and again), and the length of the delay in 16ths. The length knob is special, just tap in the upper part to increase the value and in the lower part to decrease.
Reverb: Sets the global amount of reverb applied. Turn it down to zero to free up some processing power if the sound starts skipping.
Reset button clears the internal memory of the reverb. This is needed because in very rare cases weird noises may end up looping around in the reverb.
Mono checkbox should be self-explanatory. If it's not checked, i.e. it plays in stereo, the reverb consumes processing power.
Tempo sets the playback speed in BPM (beats per minute).
Shuffle will add a groove to your song, by time-offsetting every other 16th note a bit.
16ths/bar is a way of changing the kind of rhythm in your song. Set it to 12 for 3/4ths, 10 for 5/8ths and so on.

The Sequencer

The sequencer is composed of two parts, the sequencer tab and the lower sequencer view. The lower sequencer view is activated in song mode, that is when the “Song” checkbox is checked. In Pattern mode, the view will be empty with the buttons shown disabled.

The lower sequencer’s rows are – from top to bottom – synth 1, 2, 3 and the drum. The last row is not in use, possibly left empty for future add-ons(?) On each column the current played track and any automated parameters will be shown for each machine.

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How does one manipulate the sequencer? By using the buttons at the bottom of the screen, naturally! Here follows a nice description of the buttons, in the order left to right:

Play: Starts playing the song.
Stop: Stops playing.
Rec: Starts recording parameter automation events (explained more below).
+: Increases the pattern number in the selected cell
-: Decreases the pattern number
Repeat: Copies the current cell into the next cell, then steps forward
X pattern: Deletes the pattern from the selected cell
X automation: Deletes all automation from the selected cell
<<: Scrolls backwards
>>: Scrolls forwards
Song: Switch between Pattern and Song mode
Loop: Enables/disables looping

What is a nice touch is that one can record the parameter changes or, automate the parameters. This can be accomplished in two different ways. One, which I will mention here as an example, is the following. In song mode, tap record (the red circle in the bottom of the screen) and in synth 1 change the parameters as you wish and tap record once again when you’re finished. The parameter changes made will be shown as red cut-off lines in synth 1’s row (down in the lower sequencer view).

This is possible to do for all the available synths and the drum machine.

The sequencer features that aren’t available, were luckily put under the sequencer tab by the developer! ;) Here one can:

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Set loop points

Clear

Copy

Paste

Insert space

Copy pattern modes

Delete automation from loops

The System Tab

Finally, a quick look at the system tab. This is where:

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New, clears all data for a new song.
Open, allows you to open a saved song.
Save and Save As, allows you to save current song.
Exit, exits Phoenix Studio.

In other words, the system tab contains the features which could not fit into the small screen of Pocket PCs. You might have already noticed that Phoenix Studio does not show the taskbar, which usually is on the top part of the screen. The reason is most likely that the features require a lot of screen area and the taskbar would normally use up too much of that valuable area. Sad but true.

Sharing your sound

OK, you have created a song, saved it and now you want to burn a CD out of it. Well, you can not export the songs from Phoenix Studio to WAV on your Pocket PC. For this, you will need to download a (free) Phoenix Wav Exporter for PC.

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This converts the song you have made into a 16-bit 44kHz stereo WAV file, ready to convert into MP3 or burn onto CD. The exporter application is for Windows only, so any native Mac, Linux users are out of luck (unless they emulate Windows, naturally).

However, the good thing with this idea is that the WAV-file is created in matters of seconds on your PC. And, the size of Phoenix Studio on your Pocket PC is kept low, leaving you with more space to save your favorite songs. The third good point is that Phoenix Studio song files are relatively small and sending them as an attachment to someone will not take forever. The reciever can then him-/herself download the converter application and listen to the music.