What is Meet MediaBand?

This collection of artwork and music from Canter Technology bills itself as an interactive music video. You click through six environments, known collectively as the aetherRave. It’s not a particularly intuitive interface, often leaving you adrift among rendered columns and gratuitously Photoshopped artwork.

There’s a lot of high-resolution art here but very little emotional resolution. For instance, the interactive UnDo Me video in the Stage Room offers 14 different viewer-controlled variations, but none of them are engaging, and the music is innocuous and bland. The same is true of the House Jam video, in which you control a disjointed collection of images and short music samples by clicking your mouse. Alter a few minutes of clicking, I’d seen most of the variations and was ready to move on.

The other “rooms” on the disc are even less engaging. In the Smart Bar, pixelated QuickTime sprites spout clichéd sound bites about the information superhighway and glib aphorisms like “Information wants to be free, shoes want to be expensive.” Canter may have intended this to be irreverent and hip, but it just comes across as hackneyed geek-speak.

The Kids' Room, the Archives, and the Tekno Room seem to be afterthoughts composed of half-baked QuickTime clips, technical info, and animations, apparently dropped onto the disc to fill space! The final room is the Swag Shop, an interactive sales pitch for T-shirts and other MediaBand parapherna1ia.

After a few viewings, you'll have explored most of the variations that Meet Media Band has to offer. It feels more like a promotional CD or a demo than a complete entertainment disc.

Hawn, Matthew. (July 1996). Interactive Music-Video Games. Macworld. (pg. 64).

Download Meet MediaBand for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II