Music Maker MX Production Suite - Electronic Software Download

It describes itself as a production suite, and it certainly is one. It has just about everything you could possibly want for recording, editing and assembling professional-quality music in a home studio. I am frankly amazed at what it does, though that may be because it's been a while since I've done anything serious with music recording. The range of musical beats, drums, bass, guitars, keyboards, loops, atmospherics, sounds, and so on that it can create puts a vast variety of musical possibilities at your disposal.

I play piano, so I naturally gravitated toward seeing what it could do with MIDI input from my digital piano. It handled input from live playing directly into a recording track, which I could then edit like any other, with of course the ability to edit the MIDI information. This makes it possible to reposition notes that are slightly off the beat, and to do with it all the things one expects to do with MIDI data. Recording input from microphones is just as easy.

You can also import audio tracks via the import menu, or simply by dragging and dropping directly into a track on the screen. From that point import is mostly automatic. For example, import offers a very nice tempo and beat recognition tool. This does a brilliant job of identifying the tempo, and applies the metronome to the track, so you start with the beats in perfect time, and it identifies beats-per-bar. You can adjust all this in the import process, of course, but I've yet to see it get it wrong. You can also use this tool to shift the beat timing off-beat if that suits your purpose. Another thing it can do while it's at it is to add harmony to an import, in which you can choose the keynote and chord of the harmony.