Review of PowerTracks Pro Audio 5.0

by Mike Henson, Tulsa Computer Society, From the June 1999 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

PowerTracks Pro Audio is a professional, easy to use, fully featured MIDI sequencing and Digital Audio recording program for only $29. That's right, only $29! This package does a lot of what the more expensive packages can do, and then some. It even has notation printing, a Karaoke style lyrics window, a guitar window, a drum window, and a digital audio effects processor. With this newest version they have also added support for long file names, something that has been requested for some time now.

To start with, you can enter notes into PowerTracks in either real-time, step-time or mouse point and click. This means that you can play a MIDI keyboard and record exactly what you play as you play it, or you can enter each note one at a time, or you can point and click with a mouse to enter notes directly onto a musical staff. You can play back a track of previously recorded music while recording another track using a different instrument. This makes it very handy for "layering" sounds until you have a rich-sounding, multi-track MIDI song. It will record up to 48 tracks of music and digital audio, so you won't run out of room. It also allows for "punch" recording, which enables you to fix a mistake in the middle of a song without having to re-record the entire track.

The package comes with over 20 different windows, including: Tracks, Bars, Meter Map, Tempo Map, Standard Notation, Lead Sheet, Staff Roll, Event List, Mixer, Piano keyboard, Guitar fretboard, Drum grid editor, Animated Drums, Comments, Sys-ex editor, Playback/Record Tool Bar, VU Meters, Digital Audio, and a Big Lyrics window. Few other MIDI sequencers have this many windows, especially those that cost under $200.

PowerTracks can read and write standard MIDI files (.MID), as well as Karaoke files (.KAR). It can also open Wave files (.WAV) and the new .MP3 files, so you can play with the audio effects such as reverb, echo, chorus, flanger, tremolo, compressor, gate, distortion and more.

The quantize and randomize (humanize) features are very easy to use, and they help to make the music either more rigid or more loose, based on the percentages you enter. Using the cut, copy and paste along with transpose, you can quickly get your song re-arranged and put together the way you want, with a minimal amount of time.

Even though PowerTracks Pro Audio is a sequencer package, it can also do some basic notation printing. It can read in any MIDI file and display and print a single track in music notation or as a lead sheet. You can add chord symbols and lyrics to the printout. It even has tablature printout capability for guitarists.

A really great feature of PowerTracks is that it is expandable by 3rd party developers. Programmers can extend the features of PowerTracks using the language of their choice (C, Basic, Delphi) using .DLL files. If you are a programmer, you can customize PowerTracks to your needs. If not, you can purchase third-party programs as add-ons for doing a variety of additional functions.

All in all, this is a very powerful package for a mere $29. Since I'm always looking for a bargain, I ran right out and purchased a copy as soon as I saw this product, and am glad I did. Requirements are: Windows 95/98/NT or 3.1, 8 MB RAM, and 20MB disk space.