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Tested 10 to 10,M-Audio Oxygen8
Technology has done a lot for music, but perhaps the most interesting recent development is the widespread availability of music-production tools for the average home computer. One of the most versatile of these is the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) keyboard, which essentially lets the user play a vast array of musical instruments using a single keyboard (or controller). M-Audio has been in the MIDI game from the outset, and the company touts its highly portable Oxygen8 keyboard as the "MIDI controller that started it all. " If that's the case, then M-Audio certainly started on the right foot. The Oxygen8 is a well-designed, integral tool for the mobile musician. But novices, beware: Taking full advantage of the Oxygen8 requires practice--and lots of it.
The Oxygen8 alone is simple enough to set up, but you'll want to follow the included instruction sheet to a T; otherwise, it's easy to get confused (for example, in Windows XP, we had to go through the driver-installation steps three times, and that's normal). To use the keyboard to generate computer-based sounds, you need MIDI application software. To this end, M-Audio provides Reason Adapted, a scaled-down version of Propellerhead's genre-bending music workstation software. Setting up the software to work with Oxygen8 is a trickier matter. The included user guide offers some basic instructions. Still, we found them insufficient and had to tinker around to make any sound come through (Reason Adapted offers no documentation to help with this problem). Namely, we had to dig into both the software's preferences and the control panel to ensure that the Oxygen8 (simply called USB Keystation in menus) and the computer's sound card were properly enabled. Those using Apple computers will find the process a little easier, thanks to the built-in Audio MIDI setup utility in Mac OS X.
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