Equipment Review
Product Reviewed:
Quartz Audio 32
Made by: Digital Sound Planet
Cost: $150 US
Submitted by Dan E. Monk
Rating: 
Features:
an eight track software recording package. Support for multiple soundcards (if your computer can), real time effects, automation, midi support, waveform editing, cut & paste, tracking (bounce). Minimum hardware requirements: Windows 95, 16mg of RAM, a Pentium 90 and of course a sound card. To record and hear the playback at the same time you need a full duplex soundcard.
Technical Specifications:
N/A
What I liked:
A very intuitive interface. It looks like a mixer and works like a mixer. Volume and pan controls are always right there. As well as access to the effects. And the transport buttons look like tape transport buttons. It works the way I work. I also really really liked the real time effects. The sound quality was as good as you would expect from a 16bit 44.1 hz package. It is of course only limited by the quality of your soundcard. It is also not very hardware intensive. I've used it on my old 200mhz Cyrix with 64 meg of RAM and a 6.4 meg harddrive and 2.2 hard drive. I can consistently play 8 tracks at once. I am limited to 4 tracks of recording by my soundcard, the Gadget Labs Wave/4 but Quartz has never stuttered.
What I didn't:
No reverb effect. :-( And I would have prefferd a more robust compressor. And you can't do intricate wave form editing, no zoom in feature. Cut and paste and the bounce feature all work well, but are slow. Probably my biggest dissapointment would be the speed. But part of that is my old computer. And the price. I paid too much. Tracer now sells Audio 32 for $15.
User Tips:
Free up some hard drive space. The minimum space Quartz takes for a sound file is about 90 mg. It doesn't grow a lot from there but it does grow. For instance, a 5 minute song with 8 tracks takes about 230 mg. Which is a little more that 8 5 minute mono tracks would take. Also, take a litle time to 'tweak' things. It's beyond the scope of this review but read the manual, it does a good job of explaining things.
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