Masterwriter 3.0 review
- Masterwriter 3.0 review install#
- Masterwriter 3.0 review software#
- Masterwriter 3.0 review plus#
- Masterwriter 3.0 review download#
Finally, there's 'song information', a diverse selection of data which roughly corresponds to the metadata you might enter into iTunes or store as ID3 tags in an MP3 file.
Masterwriter 3.0 review plus#
First, there's the lyrics, plus related information gathered from the rhyming dictionary, which I'll come to in a minute.
This information falls into three categories. The six tabs to the right of the Song List tab, in essence, provide different ways of viewing different bits of information that belong to the song. The Lyrics editor is a basic word processor.When you select a song in the Song List, or create a new one, the other tabs stop being greyed out, and you can get to work channelling the spirit of Noel Coward. While they're at it, it would also be an improvement if individual songs could belong to more than one Group. As it is, all you get is a needlessly wide column for the title and needlessly narrow ones for your description of the song and the Group to which it's assigned - so narrow that you can see the Group number, but no part of its name! Again, this is a fairly simple challenge that is handled pretty well by applications such as iTunes, so I hope things will improve in future versions of Masterwriter. The Song List would also be better if you could choose what information it displayed about your songs, and change the width of the columns that present that information. As it is, most of those categories don't even exist in Masterwriter 's database, and can't be added, so managing a large collection of songs is harder than it needs to be. The Song List would be much more useful if it could be ordered at a click by categories such as date, author, artist or album, in the way you can in iTunes. By default, this lists all your songs, when you have written some you can narrow things down using the Search facility, and you can assign songs to Groups, but you're stuck with them appearing in either alphabetical order, or date order of creation. To be precise, what greets you is a blank Song List, which is the top level of Masterwriter 's song database. Some of Masterwriter's Song Info is created automatically, some needs to be entered by the user.'You will never look at a blank page again' is the motto on the DVD case, but of course the first thing that greets you on loading Masterwriter is just that. There's no manual, as such, but the program incorporates a decent interactive Help system. On my admittedly rather tired G4 iMac, Masterwriter took an annoyingly long time to boot, which is not what you want when you're visited by the Muses. At least the licence entitles you to make two installations of the program on different machines, should you need to.
Masterwriter 3.0 review install#
Registration is a bit of a pain, because it demands that the computer you install Masterwriter on be connected to the Internet - it's not like a typical challenge-and-response authorisation where you can copy the key and do the dirty work from a different machine.
Masterwriter 3.0 review download#
Masterwriter is installed from CD-ROM or by authorising the time-limited demo version that's available for download from the company's web site. To that end, the big feature is a specially designed word processor with a built-in rhyming dictionary, plus a thesaurus, conventional and phrasal dictionaries. Masterwriter has a very basic hard disk recorder that can be used Dictaphone-style to get musical ideas down, but its main focus is on helping you write lyrics. This includes lyrics, demo recordings, copyright information and publishing details along with notes about musical style, authorship, date of composition and so on. Masterwriter's Song List displays all your songs in either alphabetical order or date order of creation.At the most fundamental level, Masterwriter acts as a database that can collect together all the various kinds of information that might be associated with a song. That's the idea behind Masterwriter, a Mac- and PC-compatible program intended to help our creative juices flow as freely as possible.
Masterwriter 3.0 review software#
Maybe, just maybe, what we need in this situation is not a stronger cup of coffee, but a more sophisticated software package designed especially for songwriters. But what can you do when lyrical inspiration just refuses to strike? Rhyming dictionaries seem either to tell you what you already know, or give you something so contrived the Kaiser Chiefs would turn up their noses and all the fancy fonts and spellcheckers in the world are useless when confronted with a blank page.
well, come to think of it, most of the time I'll produce nothing whatsoever. Just give me a guitar, a Biro and the back of an envelope, and. Like many musicians, I'll take all the technological help I can get in the studio, but I'm a complete Luddite when it comes to songwriting. Or can they? The people behind Masterwriter certainly think so. Computers may have taken over every aspect of the recording process, but they still can't help you write a good song.