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Ringing World Review of Ringing Master - Printed June 2002

Ringing Master V1.08

There is an enormous range of ringing programs available so do we really need another one? My advice, had Stephen Lake asked before writing Ringing Master, would have been "No". Fortunately he didn't ask me and has gone on to produce an excellent program.

The main thing that strikes you about Ringing Master is its ease of use. With Ringing Master finding most functions is very obvious to someone with a modicum of experience with Windows based software.

Installing Ringing Master is easy. I have by today's standards lowly specified PII 300MHz PC running Windows 95, and it coped. While I probably wouldn't recommend using a 486 with 16Mb of RAM Ringing Master will run on any PC capable of running Windows 95 & upwards.

Once installed clicking on the Ringing Master icon will start the program. A wizard takes you through selecting a method or methods and then you are into the program proper. The default layout is good and uncluttered with a large window with two tabs labelled Touch and Blue Line. Initially you are in the 'Touch' screen and if we take 'Bob Major' as an example the Columns will be labelled 'W V F B I M H'. If you use Stedman then you will have conventionally numbered positions, higher or lower stages will have places added or removed. A note for Stedman conductors, you can aggregate the calling positions into pairs S H Q L if desired.

This makes it very easy for you to specify your first touch. Clicking on the tab labelled "Blue Line" you will see your touch written out, or a plain course if no calls have been specified. Actually, if all you want is a blue line then you can "preview" methods from the built in library using "method explorer", another innovative feature. Other windows display status information such as touch length, how many calls etc., and any false rows will be highlighted in the blue line display. The screen layout is easy to customise to your own preferences.

Once your blue line looks the way you would like it, either with a red treble & blue 2nd place bell, or in lurid pink & bright green, you can print it out. Here we come to a problem with Ringing Master, the printing is not yet as good as it could be. The default printing is too small. However, Stephen assures me that this will be fixed by the time this review appears. Another small gripe is that while you can save your styles, so once you have settled on a colour scheme and layout for your method you can save it as a "Style" you can't specify "last working bell". This has lead to me specifying styles called Minor, Triples Major etc in order to draw the last working bell in. These faults are presentation problems rather than huge program errors and don't detract from the enjoyable experience of using the program.

Switching to the touch window you can customise all the colours just as for the blue line window but confusingly these are not part of your style, these are default program settings, one for all touches.

By default the touch is specified using course notation, but you can switch to lead based notation, e.g. p,p,b,p,b,p. Unfortunately Ringing Master does not convert between these types, but neither does any other similar program to my knowledge. Stephen aiming to supply this function in the future.

From a technical point of view the program is excellent, several threads are employed to allow the software to "Proof Check" in the background, the key to its speed. The sound processing is also on a separate thread and WAV files, (from Worcester Cathedral), for each bell are played & mixed superbly. You can easily add your own WAV files and be "ringing" in your home tower! The display updates on another thread, therefore the program will work well on today's multi-tasking environments. There is so much else to mention to try and do justice to this program. Even if you are not interested in composing and touch proving I would recommend this program for its blue line drawing capabilities alone, the "method explorer" is easy to use and allows you to view the library of methods in a tree like structure grouped by type.

Other innovative features are the excellent musical analysis, of "all the work" in spliced touches and the speed of the program. I remember typing in my first little touch of Bob Minor and then looking for a "Prove" button, only to find the touch was already proved for me, in 0.01sec as I recall. As Ringing Master proves the touch "on the fly" invariably by the time you have finished entering your touch Ringing Master has proved it and highlighted any false rows. The learning curve for this program is not too steep and I soon found myself experimenting with the more complex features it offers.

Although, as with all software, there are some minor faults, these are very trivial and unquestionably this is the best ringing program I have seen for the PC. Although its main remit was as a touch prover, a job that it does superbly well not to mention blindingly fast, it is also an excellent blue line printing program. I think that the only real gap of any sort is that it doesn't have the support Abel has for interactive touch calling and external sensors. I know that is a contrived criticism because Ringing Master was not written with the same aims in mind as Abel. Accepting this point Ringing Master does those parts of the program that overlap with Abel more efficiently, and with an intuitive interface.

In comparison with Excalibur Ringing Master wins hands down. Anything you can do with Excalibur you can do faster and more easily with Ringing Master. Where Excalibur may take a few seconds to prove a composition, Ringing Master will take a few tenths of a second, it really is at least 10 times faster!

Is it worth the Money at £40? Definitely! If you have Abel or Excalibur on your PC and use them should you replace them with Ringing Master? For Excalibur definitely, and for Abel unless you are using its external sensors or its interactive ringing capabilities then replace it with Ringing Master.

Simon Head

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