Version 1.0 reviewed by Alex Mouton - 05/04/00

First Impressions

My first impressions of Dream Station (DS) began positively. DS installed quickly with very few queries and was ready to run within a few minutes, which I found encouraging. The first run of DS revealed a fancy splash screen and a rich blue user interface, which casually affirmed the professional quality of the program. The program seemed very strong from the beginning. The mark against DS's initial presentation was its collection of demo songs. I found them all to be pretty cheesy. Either the style was odd, or the tunings sounded a bit strange. Some of them did demonstrate the use of the program (using the tracker to control the synth, automating knobs,) but none of them truly glorified DS, and made it a bit harder to appreciate its strengths. This is only a small shadow on this program's overall performance, and it really showed itself better on closer inspection.

Interface

The DS interface is very well done. The blue toned graphic work is not intrusive, and gives the synthesizer portion of the screen a realistic feel. All the knobs of the synthesizer and mixer are well represented and labeled, and easily adjusted. The values of every knob on the synthesizer are displayed ambiguously in a range of 0 to 100%, which I found unsatisfactory for some situations. Specifically, the attack, decay, and release of an envelope and the rate of an LFO could benefit from an absolute time scale in seconds or beats while the tune of the oscillators could benefit from a gross detune measured in half-steps.

The complementing portion of the Interface is a traditional tracker. The display for the tracker is very functional, showing a familiar ASCII-style look. The keyboard interface of DS appears to be similar to most other pure trackers (perhaps following a FT2 lineage?) and will not surprise any experienced trackers but may puzzle those new to tracking music. I was constantly aching for some use of my mouse in the tracker section of the program, as I wanted to focus my time making sounds and less time coding music.

Engine

The synthesizer of DS is a versatile, three oscillator engine. The second oscillator is capable of frequency modulation and ring modulation of the first oscillator, and also synchronization of its waveform with that of oscillator one. To complete the synth, DS also offers a Low-pass/Band-pass/High-pass/Formant filter, 1 LFO, plus vibrato, portamento and distortion. The synthesizer is also capable of playing 16-bit 44.1khz mono .wav files either individually, or key-grouped. Curiously, there are some .wav files, which are stored incorrectly. DS does not read these files, apparently a whole class of them, and returns you a rather bland error message, which can be rather frustrating at first, but is easily avoided. During my work with DS I also ran into a problem where the oscillators stopped sounding, while the noise generators and .wav playing capabilities remained intact. A system restart seemed to fix the problem, which is not fun, but this difficulty is easily excusable, as it is the only fault I found in the program during my time working with it.

Control

Most electronic music really suggests a different model for song development than the one used in DS. Using a tracker, introducing a kick drum rhythm, then layering snares and cymbals and high hats in succession requires a painful amount of copying and pasting, which quickly removes any of the artistic, expressive or musical elements of composing and reduces music to song programming. My ideal sequencing structure, some hybrid between the sequencers of Rebirth and Logic which would allow one pattern to continue easily while others come and go, would help me make better use of DS. Of course, many people have made, and continue to make, tunes far beyond my ability and do just fine with trackers. I can only caution that a tracker may be the tool you use to make a wicked tune, but it might also be the tool you use to annoy yourself needlessly.

DS does however benefit from an automation system that allows you to record knob tweaking and throbbing behind the scenes and does keep the song writing a short step away from being completely mechanistic. Also, the synthesizer can be controlled from third-party MIDI applications using its virtual MIDI ports.

Verdict

Dream Station is very remarkable for what it is. Brian, Matthias, Hubert, and Zoltan have created a quality product in their first version. I think it could develop into a great program given time. Unfortunately, Dream Station is fighting in a very crowded space of sound machines, and it hasn't won a permanent position in my music system.

Pros

• Excellent knob automation.
• Synth design is nicely complicated.
• Synth and sequencer integration is well done.

Cons

• Synth doesn't sound amazing.

• Trackers are difficult to work with.