First Looks and Nifty Gadgets

irst Looks and Nifty Gadgets brings you reviews of the new and novel. Every two weeks we take a look at what's just hitting the streets and some tiny, but tried and true products that are still helping people be as productive as possible.

This month we look at: tWave 1.23 | pm123 beta 2

tWave 1.23

tWave is a collection of audio utilities and players for OS/2 from 40th Floor software. Most are command line applications, but one, called gWave, is a Presentation Manager (GUI) MP3 player (.GIF, 10K) with a pair of real-time graphical displays.

While being a bit on the ugly side (compared to pm123 below), it features both graphical VU meters for the left and right channels, and a real-time frequency monitor. For non technical people, this means it has those cool displays with the needles that kick back and forth and the bars than flow up and down in time with the music.

A little disappointing is the lack of polish in features as well as appearance. gWave has no "File open" dialog or drag-n-drop support for loading the playlist. If the Audio MPEG (or "MP3") files are not in the current directory from which it's launched, gWave won't find them. gWave is also murderous with its CPU demands, more so than other MP3 players, mostly due to its real-time displays. (These can, however, be switched off.)

The remaining utilities, which work from the command line, are a WAV file player and recorder, MP3 decoder, CD Direct Audio Extractor (pull tracks off a music CD direct to .WAV file -- no jitter correction though), and a CD player. All utilities use the DART (Direct Audio Real Time) extensions that already come with Warp 4.

tWave 1.23

by Cornel Huth / 40th Floor
download from the tWave home page (ZIP, 284K)
Registration: US$20

pm123 beta 2

Beating gWave's homely look by far, but without the cool real-time displays, is the second beta of pm123, another audio MPEG (MP3) player for OS/2. Its major new feature, and what will undoubtedly win it top marks in the beauty contests, is support for skins. What are "skins" you ask? They're collections of bitmaps, fonts and color arrangements that redefine the look of pm123's interface. You can leave its default look, which is a plain gray texture, or you can hop over to the Skins Archive and download a new one (15 already available, at the time this was written), or even crack open an editor and make your own. Skins can be loaded on the fly, even while you're currently playing a song.

For Example:

Or the ever popular, "Little Pig":

Other functional improvements over the first beta are a slider progress bar that can be grabbed and moved to reposition the point in the song, plus improved forward/backward scanning within a song.

pm123 beta 2

by Taneli Leppä / Samuel Audet
download from the pm123 home page (ZIP, 353K)
Registration: Freeware

That's it for this issue. Tune in next time for more reviews of neat gadgets and first looks at new OS/2 tools.

Copyright © 1998 - Falcon Networking

ISSN 1203-5696