Tascam US122 Audio/MIDI Interface with Free Software Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)I finally got the unit. It got derailed and took a while but i need it and am satisfied with price and fact it was delivered to me.

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The US-122 features 2 XLR-based, phantom-powered mic inputs. As one of the only small computer interfaces with analog inserts, you can use the US-122 to place hardware devices (compressors, etc.) into the recording signal chain. Two line-level inputs on balanced 1/4 in. TRS jacks are included, and are switchable to guitar-level for direct instrument recording into your computer. The US-122 also provides a dedicated control for adjustable zero-latency direct monitoring, providing a sonically pure reference point before entering DAW processing.

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Music Maker 16 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)The new Music Maker 16 comes with really cool new sounds and effects. For me the guitar amplifier Vandal se is the absolute highlight on this software! Furthermore I like the new option to play the instruments via the pc keyboard, with this I can play around and try some new melodies, if there is no midi keyboard close at hand.
5* because it is easy for beginners and extensive for pros (pros should have a look at the premium version of this software)!
Cheers

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MAGIX Music Maker 16 turns making music into a real experience. Easily get started and make your own exciting songs from scratch! Use practical info videos and numerous support options to develop your own musical style right away--without any prior skills. Thousands of sounds, realistic instruments, and great effects to create explosive drums, crunchy basses, and super melodies--simply get started in the world of music production.

Newest features to make your own sound
Sound archive with about 1,500 Sounds & Loops The new sound package features new loops and samples from every musical genre, e.g. rock, pop, dance, hip hop, disco house, techno, chillout, ambient, film music, minimal electro, and many more! Over 1,500 professional sounds provide the ideal basis for your sound experiments.
All sound building blocks can be combined without any problems and adjust automatically to the current song tempo--this ensures that you'll always be on the beat to let you concentrate completely on making your own sound.
Vandal SE: Top-quality guitar sounds With Vandal SE, the authentic guitar and bass amplifier, making music becomes a real experience.
Thanks to unbelievable sound fidelity and plenty of effects, your own songs become real hits with fantastic vintage sounds--that makes discovering new sounds a blast.
Helpful learning tools Music programs often seem so technical and complicated that the fun of making music is usually left out. With MAGIX Musik Maker 16, it's a different story: To ensure a seamless start, you may request support starting from the very first step!
The useful Infobox and the new interactive training course help you get to know everything about the program in the shortest space of time. Simply switch it on by clicking it and learn even more about making music during the process!
Get professional audio effects With the new essential FX effects series, any sound can be changed quickly and easily. Effects like chorus or flanger make exciting tones and real sound design a reality. Get the sound of the pros on your own PC--without any prior skills or technical knowledge.
Play any instrument right away with your PC keyboard Get started right away with the new version--play and record all instruments directly via your PC keyboard. Recording your own melodies, basses, or drums and mixing them into your own songs is even easier now!
Practical tools To make your own recordings easier to edit and perfect for your own music projects, every loop and sound can now be cut sample-exactly and positioned perfectly in the song with the object microscope. The object inspector also enables all settings and adjustments to be made directly in the Media Pool, which makes working with sound objects easier than ever before.
Simplified export dialog Exporting a finished song or video is even easier now, since the new export dialog provides a clearly laid-out list of the most important export options!
Transfer your own songs to your MP3 player, cell phone, or post them online on MySpace, YouTube and even on your own website in minutes!
Easy-to-use music composition software
Create your own music: It's easy
1. Select soundsPreview and select sounds in the Media Pool--or import your favorite songs from CD or MP3 and use them in your own song project.
2. Combine themAll sounds and loops can be easily cut, edited, copied, and arranged into your own song.
3. Mix themEasily add effects, vocals, and adjust volume with the new mixer.
4. Publish itExport the songs you create as MP3s, burn them to CD, or publish them on the web.

Easy mode If you want, only the most important areas will be shown to make it immediately clear to you so that you won't have to wait too long to make your first songs!
PLUS! Practical help videos that help you make music like the pros in the shortest time possible.
Over 1,500 Sound loops and samples
Sound archive The new sound package features new loops and samples from every musical genre, e.g. rock, pop, dance, hip hop, disco house, techno, chillout, ambient, film music, minimal electro, and many more! Over 1,500 professional sounds provide the ideal basis for your sound experiments.
All sound building blocks can be combined without any problems and adjust automatically to the current song tempo--this ensures that you'll always be on the beat to let you concentrate completely on making your own sound.
What are loops? Loops are audio building blocks that are edited so that they play over and over without interruption. Melodies or drums are often played in loops to repeat multiple bars.
With an audio program like MAGIX Music Maker 16, slightly different loops can be combined to create your own songs. That's how you can make your own hits in record time.
Virtual instruments: Drums, Keyboards, Strings and More
Virtual Instruments MAGIX Music Maker 16 offers ultra-realistic simulations of real instruments like acoustic guitars, electric guitars, electric basses, bass, drums, grand pianos, electric pianos, power chords, synth bass, and much more
Thanks to the professional sound engine from Yellow Tools, making music with real sounds becomes an acoustic experience!
Get into the details when you want to The practical MIDI editor enables melodies to be simply drawn in and changed! You'll also receive more exciting synthesizers like LiViD, the first-class virtual drummer.
NEW! Play any instrument right away with your PC keyboard
Music Mixing and Sound effect solution
Mixing & effects Use the integrated studio-quality effects to get the most out of your smash hits!
Mix your music like a pro: All of the tracks can be adjusted to suit each other with the integrated mixer, and a click adds enriching real effects--that's how to make your sound brilliant, pumping, and crystal clear! TIP! Thanks to numerous effects and templates, which have been provided especially by pros, it's easy for everyone to find their own perfect sound.
Vintage Effects Suite Vintage effects provide even more possibilities for your own sound!
Make music with a personal touch--thanks to typical effects for any musical style. Numerous professional effects templates make using the Vintage Effects Suite child's play, and exciting results are produced quickly.
Sound effects and custom guitar sounds
Top-quality guitar sounds With Vandal SE, the authentic guitar and bass amplifier, making music becomes a real experience.
Thanks to unbelievable sound fidelity and plenty of effects, your own songs become real hits with fantastic vintage sounds--that makes discovering new sounds a blast.
Audio effects: essential FX With the new essential FX effects series, any sound can be changed quickly and easily. Effects like chorus or flanger make exciting tones and real sound design a reality.
Get the sound of the pros on your own PC--without any prior skills or technical knowledge.
Great all purpose sound editing solution
Music for videos, photos, websites, and much more MAGIX Music Maker lets everyone add their own unique polish to their work, without prior skill and without long learning period. You'll create perfect slideshows, video clips, and much more.
Who wouldn't like it? Hollywood-style cinematic sound, made by you and perfectly tailored to all of your needs. The songs you make will turn your own videos and slideshows into a unique experience.
TIP! Anyone who is already familiar with MAGIX photo and video software will be able to get started with MAGIX Music Maker quickly and easily.
Export your sounds and music to any source
Export and publish Find new listeners quickly--who doesn't want that? Publish songs directly on the web, transfer them to an MP3 player, and create your own demo or album CDs. Everything is possible with one click.
Feature your own songs online on video portals like YouTube or NEW! MySpace--directly from within the program.
Online extras Catooh--the Online Content Library is the online sound archive. Whatever you're looking for--drum loops, instruments, vocals, or sound effects. Direct connection to this massive sound library supports every song idea with the right material. Special tips about audio software are available at magix.info.
magix.info--the Multimedia Knowledge Community: Quick and direct answers to all of your questions about producing music: Simply write the question into the text window and submit it online--you won't have to wait long for the answer!
Fully compatible with Windows 7 MAGIX Music Maker 16 has been tested for operational conformity and functional security in Windows 7.
The advantage: If you switch to the new Windows operating system, you will be able to continue to use this product as usual.

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Propellerhead Reason 5 Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Reason is definitely a contender to become one of the best DAW's in the future although it's my belief that there is still things within the package that need work.
In it's out-of-the-box state, Reason offers a variety of tools to quickly compose beautiful sounding tracks of any genre of music you'll be into. The included virtual rack should provide enough tools to make the average musicians ideas easily come to life and the sound quality of all the included sounds and effects are beautiful. Where Reason begins to show some weakness is when it comes to integrating 3rd party tools and using sources outside of Reason to create music. I find myself frustrated at times with the products paradoxical ease and difficulty. I attempted to use some VST and VSTi plug-ins and they were unusable in Reason, although they do give you enough in the Reason package to compensate for it's difficuties in this department so I got over it quickly. I also had some issues with Recycle/Dr. Octo-Rex and how it calculates tempo and found it difficult to get accurate BPM information making any imported sequences not sync properly with the rest of the composition and with lesser products out there like VirtualDJ, which makes syncing tracks with different tempos a cinch, this seems inexcusable. Reason gives me the impression that your best bet when using it is to create what you'd like in Reason and don't attempt to import anything in the process, then export your finished portion into a DAW that handles tempo synchronization and sampling better to finish your work. The most glaring ommission of this product is that you cannot use mic inputs and record your vocals in Reason, which is again disjointed because Reason does so much yet is lacking and I find it baffling.
In the end I don't regret having Reason and believe it's an excellent almost must-have tool in a musicians arsenal, however, I couldn't call it a complete DAW because it lacks some major things but I figure Propellerhead is working on it and hopefully Reason 6 will fix these omissions and flaws and make Reason the product it deserves to be, a complete Digital Audio Workstation.

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The Reason rack comes with all the gear you could possibly need: samplers, analog synths, graintable synth, vocoder, mixer, drum machines, arpeggiator, compressors, EQ and effects. With its generous sound bank and intuitive flow, Reason helps you along in your creative process, and never gets in your way. Version 5 adds the mighty Kong Drum Designer, the versatile Dr. Octo Rex loop player, live sampling input, the Blocks pattern based sequencing mode and more.
About ReasonReason's heart is its virtual rack of instruments and effects. As you create your track, Reason automatically patches and cables your rack. If you want to get deep, simply flip the rack around and route the cables any way you like.

Finding your sound is an important part of the musical process. With Gigabytes of synths, samples, drum kits, and effects, Reason's sound bank is packed with everything you'll need from the start. Want more? Expand your palette with a world of ReFill libraries.

The thing that strikes new Reason users most is how much they get done in a short amount of time. Reason's legendary creative flow keeps you focused on the music — and the fun. At all times.

Need more gear? No problem. Choose a synth, a drum machine, a loop player or any device from the Create menu and it will instantly appear in your rack, logically patched into the signal chain. And because Reason is designed to go easy on your computer, you can repeat the process until you're more than happy.

Each unit in Reason's virtual rack is edited from its own on-screen front panel. All the sliders, knobs, buttons and functions are right in front of you, ready to be tweaked, turned and twisted in absolute real-time. And all your front panel actions — filter adjustments, pitch bending, gain riding or panning — can be recorded and automated in the Reason sequencer.

A single key press will turn Reason's rack around, and there you are, in patch cord heaven. Most audio connections are made automatically. When a new device is created, it appears immediately below the currently selected device, and Reason patches it into the system in the most logical way. Repatch by dragging the patch cord plug to the desired connector to build your own sounds — or tweak the included presets.
New in Reason 5Dr. Octo Rex Loop PlayerThe upgraded Dr. Octo Rex loop player loads eight REX loops into one player and lets you switch between them on the fly. This makes arranging a breeze — load the drum loops into one player, the guitars into another and use the sequencer to select what loop to play in a pattern-like fashion.With eight loops to switch between, the new loop player also comes ready for the experimental minded. Set the player to retrig the loops on the beat, on the bar or on the 16th note. Or program the loops manually like in the original rex player.For each of the eight loops, the new rex player also comes with an expanded set of per-slice settings. Set pan, pitch, filter frequency and level, reverse slices, use multiple outputs, create alternating groups of slices and much more.The Reason 5 Factory Sound Bank comes complete with guitar and acoustic drums patches for Dr. Octo Rex and a huge selection of techno, house, club, hip hop and r&b loops from signature sound designers.

BlocksMany musicians tend to think of music in terms like intro, verse, chorus, breakdown, buildup and so on. With the new Blocks mode in Reason 5 and Record 1.5, your sequencer does too.Blocks lets you sequence your songs using a more pattern-based approach, with the segments of your song as individual building blocks to be laid out in your arrangement.Start by creating the discrete parts of your song in blocks mode. When you are ready to start building your song, just switch back to song mode and draw in what blocks should play in the dedicated pattern lane. Use one block for the verse and one for the chorus — or build your song around a single 8-bar loop.Blocks provide a very fast way of creating a musical structure for your song. But the options don't end there. With the basic arrangement laid out, you can see the contents of the blocks and create variations and mute individual parts, or add further musical elements in song mode.A typical use for Blocks is to create your backing track in blocks and then use the song mode sequencer to record vocals or instrumental performances. For music based around a single looped section, one repeated block with automation and mutes of individual tracks added in song mode makes arranging a breeze.You never have to commit to using either mode — you are free to move back and forth between Blocks and Song mode, and any changes you make in your Blocks will instantly be manifested in all instances of that Block. Need some tambourine on that chorus? Add it, and there will be tambourine whenever the chorus block is playing.

Live SamplingRemember the time when samples were something you sampled and not loaded from your hard drive? When a sampler was a machine that could record samples, not just play them back.As samplers became software instead of machines, they came to rely on external sample editing software for recording and editing the samples and the art of spur-of-the-moment creative sampling was pretty much lost. Now we are bringing it back to Reason 5 with its live sampling input.All sample players in Reason are now samplers. Just hook up a sound source to the rack's sampling input and you are ready to start sampling. Use a mic, a turntable, an instrument or the entire Reason mix.Sampling in Reason is simple and straightforward. Hit the sample button and Reason starts sampling. Reason will detect the sample start automatically. You can sample when Reason is running too if you like — no need to stop the music.If needed, bring up the built-in sample editor to set start and end points, loop points and more. This is possible for all loaded samples by the way — not only the ones you have sampled.As always, Reason lets you focus on music making — and sampling in this case. All samples are neatly stored in our song file and accessible in the new samples pane in the tool window. Here you can easily see what samples are loaded into what machine and delete and export samples as you wish.Live sampling together with pitch detection of root key and automatic zone mapping makes it dead easy to sample an instrument and map the samples across the keyboard. This way you'll create your own multi-sampled instruments for NN-XT and NN-19 in an instant.

Kong Drum DesignerAnalog synthesis, physical modeling, sampling, REX loops, support sound generators, effects, flexible routing, multiple hit types and more. The Kong Drum Designer is not your regular drum module. It's the drum module focused on letting you get exactly that drum sound you're after. Kong has 16 pads and 16 drums. Build your drum sounds based on any of the nine different drum modules. Flavor the sound with 11 support generators and effects. Program automation, create alternating groups and let Reason's powerful sequencer control the beat.Reason 5 ships with a sound bank with a generous supply of kits for Kong across a wide variety of styles.

System RequirementsWindows
Intel Pentium 4/AMD Athlon or better (multiple cores highly recommended)
1GB RAM
DVD drive
Windows XP SP3, Vista or Windows 7
2 GB free hard disk space
Monitor with 1024x768 resolution or larger
A 16 bit Windows compatible audio card, preferably with an ASIO driver
A MIDI interface and a MIDI keyboard recommended
Requires any version of Reason or Record Reason Duo
Mac
Intel Mac (multiple cores highly recommended)
1 GB RAM or more
DVD drive
Mac OS X 10.4 or later
2 GB free hard disk space
Monitor with 1024x768 resolution or larger
CoreAudio compliant audio interface or built-in audio hardware
A MIDI interface and a MIDI keyboard recommended
Requires any version of Reason or Record Reason Duo

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