DM1 - The Drum Machine for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By Lowrenthighrise

  It's Okay

  First, the Cons: 1. Glitchy. VERY VERY glitchy. If you catch a button at the right second, it will repeat a tone endlessly. 2. Slow. This is definitely not optimized and it has a very noticable lag. Some buttons get locked to the cursor so you can accidentally crank the volume up when you move your mouse. 3. Full Screen is wildly imperfect. It cuts off the top the screen. It leaves the buttons at the top half visible so they are usable unless you try to switch desktops, then you lose everything at the top and have to exit and reenter Full Screen. Otherwise, you have to use all of the function screens separately and no, you cannot separate and see them all at once or layer them like windows. 4. Seemingly no app connectivity to Garageband or any other program that I can see. I just downloaded this so I'm not an expert yet and MAYBE it has something (I've seen some posts about using it as a midi controller) but I haven't found it and I looked... Now the Pros: 1. TONS OF INSTRUMENTS! The drum kits are extensive and sound fantastic. 2. The interface is very user friendly (when it's working properly), intuitive & easy to learn.

  
  
• By B'bba

  Useful sounds, quick to make standard grooves & chain patterns

  DM1 has an impressive collection of sounds. It is easy to make fun grooves in standard time-signatures. Though the app shows 6/8, 9/8 and 12/8 as options, it does not treat the dotted quarter-note as a beat (which is standard). So it is basically just truncating the pattern length with no actual triplets. This is a considerable oversite since you might like to have a groove with actual triplets in it. It’s not a deal breaker, it is just a “fake” feature that requires you to do some work-arounds. All they would need to do is scale the step to beat/tempo ratio from 4:1 to 3:1. I’ve mentioned this to the developer but gotten no response about it. Would love to see this app evolve into a more rhythmically versatile PC. For example, would love to see beats be able to be divided (per track, per beat) a la iOS’s Molten.

  
  
• By Awe russets

  Very Cool and Fun, with two limiting features

  Very impressive choice of drum sounds, and I love the way it displays it out on the screen. IT shows each main beat with its subdivision that you just write onto…awesome! I just need to beg you, Please make it so that we can switch between drum sets in the middle of a song!! That would make it so much more awesome. And please add two functions: Allow us delete songs, we are made to clear out the screen and can never completely delete a project ? 2) Let us scroll through the timeline. THANKS You’re the Best! My kids love to play with it.

  
  
• By Shponglizer

  Editors Choice???

  There is no way should this app be an Editors Choice. Editors Choice should be for apps that have payed attention to the details. This app is clunky, unresponsive, and clearly not optimized for the Windows. Fullscreen view: Its cropped at the top on my screen. No attention to detail. Toms: Drum machines should have three toms, high, medium, and low. This drum PC only has one. Also there should be both Crash and Ride cymbals. DM1 just has a single generic "Cymbal". External drum PC triggering: I use this app for testing an external drum PC. Every time I start DM1 I have to go to the Song panel, to click the MIDI button, then clock the Refresh button. Then I have to make sure that it's set to send notes and/or tempo to the correct MIDI output(s). Every single time. It's not hard for an app to remember MIID settings, each port has a unique ID to it and you just need to save that ID and look for again when you restart. If the ID isn't there, then just turn off external MIDI output. MIDI: Someone there should run midi monitor on this app because after every note on and note off, it sends illegal midi, several bytes of all 0's. I'm purposefully being hard on this app in this review because I want to like it. I want it to be better at what it does.

  
  
• By M A-M

  a gltichy nightmare

  I'm assuming if I use curse words, my review will be taken down but rest assured, I would use all of them in my description of this app. Trying to export your beat once you have it results in a myriad of fails including but not limited too: immediately crashing the program, exporting only part of the song (not even ther first or last part, often just a chunk in the middle somehow), and most mindblowing of all - TEMPO CHANGING IN THE TRACK. That's right, a drum PC that when exporting to wav file will somehow speed up or slow down the track, and not even the entire track - I'm saying as the track goes on it speeds up. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE IN A DRUM PC? Using the app itself is intuitive and comes with a great bank of classic drum machines (including some oddball ones you don't see often) but what good is that if I cannot export the beat to a DAW? I would give this minus five stars if I could just for the time I've spent fixing the issues its faulty export function creates. DO NOT BUY THIS APP.

  
  

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