Originally published in Transoniq Hacker
Issue #37
REVIEW: Leaping Lizards' Chameleon
Reviewed by Gary Morrison
FOR: Mirage
PRODUCT: Chameleon
PRICE: $39.95 + $2.50 shpg.
FROM: Upward ConceptsYou know, in a way there really isn't very much to say about Leaping Lizards' Chameleon. Sampling keyboards may be the simplest and cheapest way to get natural-sounding timbres, but making good samples is still not an easy process. That means that you're either going to spend lots of time or lots of money to get a good sample library together. Whether you spend lots of time or lots of money on your samples, you ought to be willing to spend about $40 on full Chameleon insurance coverage on them.
What Is Chameleon?
Chameleon is a series of fifteen disk utilities and diagnostics for the Mirage. Other companies offer disk utilities for the Mirage, so what makes these different? Two things: completeness and ease of use. As an example of completeness, not only can you format a disk and put the operating system onto it, but you can also back up an entire disk - operating system, samples, sequences, and all - in one simple operation. As for ease, when you swap disks during the copy, it senses when you've inserted the source or destination disk, so you don't have to hit ENTER or anything like that.
Chameleon basically breaks down into two separate sets of utilities: disk utilities and diagnostics. The disk utilities help you avoid losing your sample library, and the diagnostics help you find any subtle problems with your Mirage itself. Chameleon is yet another alternative operating system for your Mirage. When you boot Chameleon, you don't have any of the normal Mirage functions, such as sequencing, sampling, or even playing. (This, of course, in no way affects your Mirage's ability to do these functions under the normal operating system.) For most of the functions, you won't use your keyboard at all so, for the most part, it works equally well on rack-mounted Mirages as it does on keyboard Mirages.
What can you do with Chameleon?
Chameleon uses single-digit keystroke commands. It prompts you either with "du" for "disk utilities" or with "dI" for "diagnostics". You can toggle between the two using the "0/Prog" key. After you select one of those modes, you choose a command using the digit keys. Here are the commands in each mode:
Disk-Utility Mode:
- Format Disk (and optionally place an operating system onto it).
- Load operating system to place onto the disks you format.
- Save operating system onto already formatted disk (good for upgrading your disks to a newer revision of the operating system).
- Backup entire disk.
- Check to see if a disk is formatted and if it has any formatting errors on it.
- Recover data on an errant disk. This is listed as a last-ditch effort.
- "Easy Backup" - Now here's a real nice touch! Suppose you are at a friend's place jamming on your Mirages and you find a really cool sample that you want. Swapping disks is a pain, so ... just hook your MIDI OUT to your friend's MIDI IN and vice-versa, boot the Chameleon on both machines, and tada! No disk-swapping necessary - they do it all over MIDI.
- Reboot the Mirage.
Diagnostic Mode:
- Check pitch-bend wheel range and centering.
- Check modulation wheel range.
- Check keyboard MIDI note numbers.
- Check attack velocity.
- Check release velocity.
- Check sustain pedal.
- Check keypad.
- Verify that the disk drive can sense a disk being present or not.
Did it work as advertised?
Generally, I was quite impressed with how well Steven Fox (the Leaping Lizard himself) did his homework on this one. I found Chameleon to be a well-thought-out and very comprehensive utility. For the most part, not only did it work as it was advertised to work, but it worked very well. For instance, if an error is encountered while doing some sort of disk operation, not only does it tell you what the error was, but you can push "Param" to find the track and "Value" to get the sector on which the error occurred. Also, if you've loaded up an operating system to put onto your formatted disks, you can push "value" instead of a command digit to find out what version number that operating system is. Little things like that make a lot of difference.
In general, I found the diagnostics to be less useful than the disk utilities. The documentation, almost apologetically, states that rack-mounted Mirage owners won't be able to use all of Chameleon's features. I guess I don't see it that way. The question that immediately comes to my mind about the diagnostics is this: If your keyboard plays incorrect MIDI note numbers, you'll most likely notice that right away. How does knowing that key number 4E plays a 21 help you? You'll hand it to a dealer for repairs in either case. Certainly I don't want to imply that they are useless by any means; it's just that some of them are more useful than others. I found out, for instance, that my pitch-bend wheel didn't have quite full range and that my modulation wheel had a small dead spot at the bottom of its range.
Actually, I found the attack velocity test very nice from a keyboard technique standpoint - you can use it to precisely monitor your attack velocities as you play melodies and work for even volume. In general, however, I suspect that most Mirage owners will find that the information you get from Chameleon's diagnostic section is either readily visible in normal playing, more information than an owner would need to tell a repair man about, or too subtle to be of practical value. Others may get a different impression, however.
The only thing that just simply didn't seem to work was the sustain pedal check. Even though my sustain pedal clearly worked in normal playing, it didn't register it on the test. The only other thing that struck me as a little annoying is that you can't abort a disk copy while it is reading the source disk. Normally this isn't a problem since it doesn't take very long to read the disk. If, however, you accidentally insert a blank disk, you'll have to wait awhile for it to finish up.
Even though I found the diagnostics only moderately useful, the disk utilities are absolutely excellent and are in themselves easily worth the price.
A logical question: will Chameleon's backup function back itself up? No dice, Bub. Don't count on backing up anything other than standard Ensoniq-formatted disks. I tried a few other alternative operating systems and most of them didn't work. It wouldn't, for instance, back up Soundprocess or Upward Concepts' Mirage Monitor Disk. However, if you accidentally destroy your copy of Chameleon you can get a backup from Leaping Lizards for $5.00 plus $2.50 shipping and handling. SEE NOTE BELOW
How about the documentation?
Chameleon was definitely well documented. It was organized well, and I saw no technical errors, bad phrasing, distracting grammatical mistakes.
Should I Buy It?
Well, if you haven't gotten the point yet, the answer is "yes". I definitely recommend it highly. Having worked in the computer industry for quite some time now, I can certainly testify to how much trouble you can get yourself into without properly backing up critical information. Chameleon is the most convenient way I am aware of to do backups, and its other utilities are also very useful.
Bio: Gary Morrison's day gig is computer design engineering. His main fascination in music is xen-harmonics (unusual tunings). He aspires to become a recognized composer in that field.