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Siren by Sonic Foundry
by By Timothy Everingham NOCCC, teveringham@earthlink.net - April 20, 2000 at 17:53:39:
Sonic Foundry has been known for its ACID music composing program for musicians and those wanting to be musicians. Now it has moved into the world of the digital jukebox with Siren. It is meant for those who enjoy music and wish to better manage their music. It allows the playing of many audio formats, creating audio libraries, and exporting them to CD-R or MP3 portable players. Sonic Foundry calls Siren not only a digital jukebox, but also a personal music manager.Installation—Installation is simple via one CD. The configuration wizard starts when you start the program for the first time. An e-mail address is required to enable the CD database, which can be updated via the Internet. Registration is required for all features to be enabled, which also can be done via the Internet
Operation—The program has multiple display modes. With the standard display mode at the top is the menu bar and sound play controls. Directly underneath are, from left to right, the spectrum graphic display, the graphic equalizer controls, and the scope graphics display. Below that is the explorer panel, which has either a display of your hard disk music library, the contents of an inserted audio CD, a Windows Explorer interface or an Internet Explorer browser window. Which panel is displayed is chosen in the navigator panel to the immediate left.
Below the Explorer panel is the reverberation and time stretch controls. To the far left side of the program window is the volume panel, which displays and controls volume levels. There is also a compact skins display mode that just has the basic sound play controls in some interesting shapes such as boomerang, gadget, or even medieval, this sits on a small portion of your desktop. You can download additional shapes and skins.
In addition to music from audio CDs, you can use WAV, WMA (Windows Media Audio), and MP3 files. You can set up playlists from your hard disk music library or organize your library according to artist and genre; sometimes this is automatic. You can ask the program to search your hard disk(s) for music, and it will automatically be put in your library catalog. You can use it to play and copy songs from audio CDs. You can also download songs from the Internet using the Internet Explorer browser window and then play them.
When you play the music, the spectrum and scope graphics windows produce moving animations of the music, you can even go full screen to make your computer into a psychedelic music machine. Information about the songs that you may not get from the CD or wherever you downloaded it from may be able to be retrieved from the program’s database. If it is not the program can try a larger database via the Internet and download the relevant info.
Once you have a number of songs that you like, you can write them to a CD (if you have a CD writer) or to a portable MP3 player. However, with the CD Recorder, it is just select and immediately record the selected songs instead of dragging entries to a list that can be edited before recording.
ACID Planet—Sonic Foundry also offers free access to a music download, sharing, and discussion website called ACID Planet (www.acidplanet.com). You do have to give some personal information to become a user of the site, but it also allows you to set the rating of the material to which you wish to be exposed (G, PG, PG-13, & R). It was originally for people who used Sonic Foundry’s ACID music creation program so they could share their work with others. Now, however it is more like an online music community. With a shortcut to it on one of Siren’s drop down menus, Sonic Foundry is definitely encouraging Siren users to become part of this online community.
Documentation and Ease of Use—The program is simple to use and explore. However, exploring may take some time because the program does have some depth. There is a 42 page manual that gives an overview of the program, but the real documentation is in the help files where you will find detailed step by step instructions. The help files were created with the novice in mind, so they do not assume that you know much.
Technical support is available via the Sonic Foundry website, e-mail, fax, and telephone.
Requirements—Minimum system requirements are a 200 MHz Pentium using Windows 98 or NT 4.0, a Windows-compatible sound card, a CD-ROM drive, 32 Mb of RAM, 20 Mb of free hard drive space, Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later. These processor and RAM requirements are too low to truly get the most out of this package. The recommended RAM is 64 Mb and you may need a lot of space if you want to put a lot of music on your hard drive (4 GB=100 CDs). You will need a CD-R drive to make Audio CDs. Portable player support is not available with NT. Don’t have a very cheap sound card either; a 32 bit or higher wave-table synthesis card is much better. Cheap computer speakers or headphones are also to be avoided.
Conclusion—For those into downloading and collecting music over the Internet, Siren is a good tool to manage their music. A novice can get up to speed quickly and start having fun with it. If you wish to put music on a CD or download to an MP3 player from multiple sources, this program would be good also. This is not designed to be a cataloging program for CDs. This is probably not for your occasional Internet music user, but for someone who spends a significant amount of time downloading and playing music.
Siren—List price $39.95, $35.95 download. Sonic Foundry. 754 Williamson Street, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703. Telephone: (608) 256-3133. Website: www.sonicfoundry.com.
Timothy Everingham is a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups. He leads the Videoconferencing Pilot Project, which explores the uses of video technologies within computer user groups. He is also on the Management Information Systems Program Advisory Board of California State University, Fullerton; which he also graduated from with honors and with the double majors of Management Information Systems and Accounting.
http://home.earthlink.net/~teveringham.
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