No comments about Total Training for Adobe After Effects CS3 Essen.

No comments about Adobe PhotoDeluxe for Windows & Macintosh.

2 comments about Pro Tools LE 6 Ignite! (Power Start).

1. Author was in the right track, but just didn't write it very well. He tends to jump all over the place instead of focusing on one thing at a time. Shortcuts section in the back is very good though.



2. (...) I purchased Pro Tools LE 6 Ignite as it looked like I would get a quick briefing, an overview with enough depth to get the job done for me to understand the program. The very night before I was to use the M-Box I read sections of the book that I thought I needed to know. The read was easy; the graphics cut a lot of read time down. I was annoyed that parts of the graphics were so small that I wished I had a magnifying glass to better see menu items. The book was organized nicely for me to cherry pick what I needed to know. I did waste some time downloading the author's audio files as I determined that I did not need to use them. For some people the author's audio files will be nice to use. The next morning before the customers came into the recording booth; I downloaded music from a CD, Acid sound effects, and recorded my voice so I could put into practice what I read the night before. I was nervous when the first student walked in. I had the Ignite book with me and had to refer to it a couple of times but all three components worked wonderfully, M-Box, Pro Tools and Ignite. I was ecstatic that the book delivered what I thought it would. Actually I was very proud of my astute choice of books.

   I should not leave the reader with the impression that this book is going to give you any deep depth of understanding of the use of Pro Tools LE. The software is so wonderful that one can achieve product with a minimum of knowledge but the more you know leads to quicker and possibly better results. Ignite delivers to the reader a quick top down overview of the software to the point that you can put out product. I am a firm believer of buying multiple books for complicated software programs. I suggest you consider this book as being your first choice. This book should remove any beginning frustration a new user might have using Pro Tools LE and thus serve to keep more budding audio users in the Pro Tool camp.

2 comments about PhotoImpact 5 (Jewel Case).

1. I had been looking for this CD for quite awhile. I was surprised to find it when I was looking for something that was similar to it. Thank you.



2. This may be an old version but this is excellent software and for this price it is a steal. Why pay over $100.00? This does everything the average user could possibly need. I use it to restore old photos and I amaze even myself. I have restored pictures that are over 90 years old, loaded with cracks, tears, and missing corners. They have turned out better than when I took them to a local 'professional'. Worth every penny at 10 times the price....you really don't need a newer version!

5 comments about ACID Music Studio 6.

1. I was expecting a program that I could unlace Mp3 and use like beats off them. You cannot...This is your standerd Mixing program almozt like apple grouge band, this is compatible with muiltible Sony progams and thats some thing i do like its more about I can take the music i just made via song give you 3 cds to take and mix from some realy cool thing and mixed into a video thats great for what we do. Then we took and and put in on my psp no problem. Sony has no problem and made sure that there Sony Acid Music studio works with the video and all the others i have not not ued yet. Over all I give this a 4 from the ablitiy to cross a project over and work on it diffently, from diffent aspects. The beat counters and how you can chae your timeing is great wel trying to keep the tone in cheak is good. If you like mixing this isnt a bad starting point sony has made it very user friendly with almost all the controls explained if you need them to be via the toutorual. and with a beat mapper and perview it helps alot to know what you want an play around a bit. This is worth the money but you get what you pay for



2. hey- I got this program about a month ago and even though I haven't been able to use all the features it seems like a really good program. It does have a little delay in the recording (say, if you were trying to record a second guitar part over a first guitar its a little late) but it's easy to fix by just moving the whole bar at once. I'm a drummer who has been playing for about 8 years and guitar for 3 years and I think it's a good program. Strongly recommended... and for 50 bucks you can't go wrong.



3. I haven't used ACID Music Studio 6, I run an old version of Acid Music. However, I feel quite confident to point out an error in several reviews I have seen: if the tracks aren't lining up when recorded in the program, it is the result of the sound HARDWARE, not the software. I also experienced this problem until I got a "real" soundcard and the problem vanished.
   
   I can't speak for this newer version, but the Acid Music layout is extremely intuitive and very easy to work it.



4. If you're going to invest in music studio software then you should look at a more professional quality product. This it hard to understand and it won't do even a fraction of what I want it to do. Save your money on this and just go for the higher quality software from the beginning withough wasting money on this first.



5. ACID Music Studio is my first journey into looping software. I was totally amazed at the power and the (user friendliness) ease of use. I purchased the product primarily as a CD mixing tool and had no concept of the possibilities out there.
   
   Because of my "newness" to the genre, It took me about a day of trial and error to finally get the hang of the way the product thinks and acts.
   
   I would strongly recommend ACID Music Studio.

1 comments about MicroVision SureThing i073731 Premium CD Labels (Matte, 100-Count).

1. Decent. Pretty good. Works well

5 comments about Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Master Collection [OLD VERSION].

1. Adobe CS3 is the most powerful seamlessly integrated creative suite EVER. There is nothing that even remotely compares to this suit. To list feature by feature would take volumes and would not do it justice.
   
   If you are SERIOUS about ALL aspects of web production including multimedia video and audio, special effects, animation, and authoring, this suite does it all.
   
   This is powerful software. You will need a solid system. Because this software is so integrated you will often want 2 to 4 hefty programs running for one project.
   
   For example, I often have Photoshop, Premier, and After Effects running as well as Adobe Bridge. Adobe Bridge is what brings the whole package together. Not only does it make file organization a breeze, it allows you to move a single project from application to application.
   
   I'm running CS3 on a Dell XPS 710 w/ twin 10k hard drives, a 2.4GHz Intel duo core, an NVIDIA 8800 GTX video card and 2GB ram. It handles it, but I will be upgrading to 4GB ram so it will handle it better.
   
   Bottom line, Adobe CS3 AMAZING.



2. This baby was required for my Graphic Arts class. My first thoughts were "What's wrong with my Abode Photoshop 7? & why do I NEED a $965 piece of software?" Well, it turns out that my school's supplier was charging less than half of the retail price, so I shut up.
   .......................................................................
   When it got here, I wasn't happy that I had to install 8 dics that wanted 32 gigs of RAM or that it had more system requirements than a high-end video game. But it does make sence, concidering you're getting InDesign, Illustrator (which I've been wanting), Acrobat 8, Flash (been wanting that too), Dreamweaver (heard good things about it), Fireworks, Contribute, After Effects, Premiere, Soundbooth (if it's like Sound Forge, it's a boon), * Encore as well as Photoshop, so I'll be exploring this stuff for months.
   ....................................................................
   On the plus side, there are Flash tutorials on how to use this stuff; great for people who learn best by watching, doing, & hearing & get distracted when reading. Who knows what kind of cool artistic things I can make, I can even learn to make webtoons!



3. We did discover that the installation of the DVD did not work properly and that the hacks published on Adobe's website did not apply to us. For us to install it we had to put a CS3 map into the root of the station with exactly the same name as on the CD. It is important to maintain exactly the names and all files of the first three application DVD's. You don't have to copy all the other data to that folder, just the application directory content. From there you can run it. All other tips and tricks simply didn't work but this one did. After the intial application install you can add the other components at will directly from the DVD's.
   
   The software itself, well what can you say. It delivers what it stands for and is the #1 in this area. We rather use this then the free ware or cheaper alternatives to save money at the end of the day.
   
   I hope this is helpful for others. GZ



4. If you have Production Studio Premium or other such suites this really is not worth the massive difference in price. Adobe CS3 Master Collection is more hype and fluff then substance. I might have upgraded to this suite from my modestly priced Production Premium $799.00 upgrade if Adobe had not slapped such an outrageous $1999.00 price tag onto it for doing so. Come on, $1999.00? I paid less then that for my original full version of CS Production Studio Premium! Seriously Adobe, $1200.00 more for 5 or 6 added programs of which 2 or 3 I will probably never use? Give me a break! No, I mean it, give us ALL a break! Save your money and just go with CS3 Production Studio Premium, minus Adobe Audition 3.0 of course, you'll have to pay extra for that one since Adobe felt compelled to replace it with Soundbooth, a lesser quality program (thanks a lot Adobe!). In the end I'll say this, Adobe makes some of the best software for film, animation, entertainment, graphics and web design, they just need to work a little bit on better customer service and work ethics and a good place to start would have been making the upgrade for CS3 Master Collection a lot more affordable.



5. Anyone who gives the Master Collection less than five stars obviously doesn't know the product. I spent 4 months in a CS3 Illustrator class in college just learn advanced basics of Illustrator alone.
   User friendly, intuitive and the industry standard over ANY Microsoft product, CS3 Master Collection if for serious geeks like me.
   I cannot imagine trying to handcode HTML or XHTML without the wonders of Dreamweaver. I am much more productive and can crank out large websites in a matter of days instead of weeks. For serious Web designers, this product will pay for itself in the time you save hand coding and such. Worth every penny.
   I would, however, recommend buying Adobe's "Training from the source" books to go along with the software. You can get them cheap used on Amazon or eBay. The books are invaluable in learning the software.

2 comments about Painter Essentials 4 Upgrade.

1. The program installed with ease, just the way you expect it to on a Mac, putting the application in my applications folder. Eager to use the software, I put the application in my dock, then dropped a photo on it. The photo was on its side, so I went up to the menu and rotated it to the left (counterclockwise). Then using the rectangular selection tool, I selected an area to crop and there the fun stopped. There is no menu command for crop. I'm a Photoshop person, I live in it all the time, so for me to be frustrated at a simple paint program is saying something. Mac people don't like going to the help menu, at least not straightaway. But go to the help menu I did, found the shortcut key to crop, but it didn't work, so I guess I have more reading to do. Again, I'll say, this should be a very simple procedure and I know you can do it in this program, so I'm going to stop writing for a bit and see if I can figure it out.
   
   Well, back to the help menu and I did figure it out. Only took a minute or so. Not intuitive, but once you know, it's cool. I suppose Photoshop wasn't all that intuitive at first, more so than this though, at least for the simple commands. Still, I have to admit the crop tool is way cool.
   
   However, I seem to be having problems adjusting the brightness and contrast on my cropped image. The program thinks I want to frame it and it only wants to adjust the edges. I'm missing Photoshop, but I'm not giving up just yet. Back to the help menu and it's telling me I'm doing everything right, however the contrast isn't adjusting. I'm running an iMac with Tiger, System 10.4.10 and I shouldn't be having this problem. Okay, on to something else.
   
   The eye dropper and the paint bucket didn't work and now I know something's up. Checking around my canvas and the palettes at the side of my screen, I see the program automatically made a second layer when I cropped the image. Why did it do that? Anyway, now that I see what the program is up to I can check out the tools.
   
   I'm pleased to say, brightness and contrast work fine now that I'm in the right layer (which shouldn't have created in my opinion), as does everything else. I can recommend this program, but you'll have to do a bit of reading to figure it out, however, once you learn to think like it does, you shouldn't have many problems.



2. As soon as I loaded this program onto my computer I opened a photo I took of a red sky sunset. Using the sharpening tool I changed a pleasant and pleasing photo into something stark and a bit frightening, something that you might find on the cover of a Stephen King horror story. Frankly I didn't expect the control the sharpening tool gives. After saving a copy of the photo, I went to the undo command in the Edit Menu and quick as a wink, my photo was back to it's old, fuzzy, pleasing self again.
   
   The sketching tool turned the photo into sort of a wintery looking thing I didn't like very much at all, but after a bit of playing around with it I turned up something that looks like I might have drawn it. Now I'm an artist. I never would have believed it. The lighting tool works a treat as does the brightness and contrast. I can see that I'm going to be playing with a lot of my old photos. I can hardly wait.

3 comments about Microsoft Visio 2003 Standard [Old Version].

1. Visio has always been an excellent solution for technical diagramming. Version 2003 is no exception and improves upon its predecessor with support for the web and integration with other Office applications. The program still lacks certain elements of Microsoft Office which I feel concerned about. Users are able to import Native Auto CAD drawings directly into Visio, and use the Visio tools to further customize and edit drawings to their hearts content. You can create custom stencils save them and share with other Visio users over a corporate network. You can export diagrams as a webpage so that users who don't have Visio installed locally on their machine can View diagrams through web browser at different resolutions with ease. The program enables IT Adminstrators to create Diagrams for Active Directory role outs for Windows 2000 Server and Server 2003. SQL Server or other third party database products such as Oracle and IBM DB2 can use the Visio functionality to outline a companies storage of data through active digrams that automate how data is stored and used. You can create simple project management task, and also export other Visio digrams to PowerPoint and further edit within PowerPoint or Word.Other features include searching for stencils online in the program, which makes it easy for you to find that particular diagram. Visio still lacks certain elements such as native support for WordArt. Overall, this upgrade is a must have for existing Visio 2000 or 5.0 users, but some 2002 users might not see any need for some of the functionality and might wait first to see if their diagramming and network infrastructure needs demand the new functionality and technology that Visio 2003 has to offer.



2. I was able to turn out a complicated flowchart polished enough for professional training purposes in just two hours - despite having never used this kind of software before, and having no assistance whatsoever besides the program's own Help files. Now *that's* ease-of-use.



3. This version of Visio has many changes. Many are good improvements on previous versions. There are also some very nice additions. Unfortunately, I have yet been able to use them effectively since I find the help files to be less than informative.
   
   I gave this a 4 because of the features it contains, but not a 5 because of the help files.

5 comments about USB Music Studio Kit.

1. PROs: Comes with a good USB-to-midi cable and the basic drivers. You can record from you midi instrument (keyboard, etc) and playback through the instrument OK, and you can see and edit the midi info.
   CONs: The software is not very intuitive and I frequently find the user interface very frustrating. Although you can generate a score, you can't edit it directly - you can't edit the notation, add lyrics, or make adjustments of any kind.
   RECOMMENDATION: Buy the Yamaha UX16 USB-midi cable and one of the basic music notation programs like Finale PrintMusic or Cakewalk MusicCreator.



2. The software was easy to install under WINXP SP2 Multi Media Ed. 5. I haven't completely explored it yet, but for beginning and intermediate aspiring home studio experimenters, who want to learn something about the way music works, it looks like a powerful enough tool. The degree of control over MIDI parameters and the user interface are impressive. I have it communicating with a basic Yamaha YPT-300 keyboard. Remember, the cost of the supplied MIDI/USB cable is about worth the cost of the package. I am very satisfied.



3. This product includes both a great midi usb interface and a terrific midi sequencer. I plugged the interface into my 1st usb port and another interface into my second port and now i am running four synthesizers and a drum machine from this software. An average composition for me uses 36 or more midi tracks. The only problem i have had is, if i close the program and leave the computer running, the interface shuts off and i have to reboot. The midi transforms are amazing tools that make composing complex musical passages fast and easy. I use this for all my midi sequencing, and export the .mid files to sonar to add audio tracks, or to printmusic to print scores.



4. Great midi cable and sequencer software called Record Producer midi edition. The package also includes demo programs of other music software by turtle beach. The sequencer software goes into 30 day trial mode unless you register it. The midi cable comes with drivers thus allowing you to use the midi cable with any midi sequencing software on the market. Everything worked fine under windows xp. Overall a great package for those learning about midi.



5. PRoduct is OK ! Hardware/Driver works without a problem but software is not clear for usage. Some improvement would be appreciated.