There are countless annoying quirks; for instance, the generic track effects window is modal (ie, you cant use the rest of the program while its open), and insert effects are post-fader, which isnt so desirable.

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Were looking at the especially feature-rich Producer Edition here.

Music Maker 14 has tracks onto which you place musical clips, and a library of these is supplied, in styles such as rock, pop, dance, film score and reggae.

You can drag sounds from the spruced up Media Pool onto the tracks to start making music.

The supplied content is good, and is timestretched to fit the beat of your song.

You can record your own audio clips, but we ran into a huge problem: the mixers Live button (used to enable low-latency monitoring), as depicted in the manual, was nowhere to be seen, so we were unable to record any parts due to intolerably high latency.

Power features Music Maker has a number of features that you wont find in most of its competitors, such as the Melodyne-esque Elastic Audio pitch editor, an automatic Remix Agent that rearranges songs, and harmony recognition thats so hit-and-miss as to make it pointless for anyone who actually needs it.

It also handles video - just put video clips onto tracks as you would with sound clips.

They can be layered, faded, titled, etc, and your finished videos exported in many formats.

You map ranges in your song to QWERTYMIDI keys and trigger them for a performance.

Changes are synced the beat, and you can also program it to play parts in a specified order, which is handy for trying out ideas.

We didnt have as much luck with the Live Pads, though, which play clips that arent in the arrangement.

They didnt always fire right on the beat, and we had trouble using MIDI clips.

Included instruments Three of the supplied instruments are dedicated to percussion: LiViD is a virtual drummer that can play, say, a verse part in a rock style; Beatbox has a grid editor and over 30 kits; and Robota is a solid, 909-on-steroids effort.

Drum n Bass offers sampled drum loops and synthetic bass - you can tweak the playback order of the beats, but its a bit awkward to use.

Atmos, meanwhile, is a sound effects generator - the Hiphop preset sports a knob to crank up the level of Gunfight.

Finally, theres the excellent-sounding Vita ROMpler, with real instrument sounds such as guitars, pianos, brass, strings, and - yes - more drums.

These ones sound great, though - how annoying that the weak-sounding LiViD cant drive these cracking kits.

Unlike the other instruments, which have built-in pattern editing, Revolta 2 and Vita are driven by MIDI and edited via a piano roll.

A virtual mixer sets levels and applies effects - all the processors youd expect are here, as is a guitar amp sim.

Theres a slick-looking mastering unit too, but it lacks proper gain-staging.

Unfortunately, the app as a whole lacks cohesion, and isnt as good in practice as it is on paper.

Speaking of which, the 300-page manual is hardly a light read, but the brief introductory video is a good start.

Summary At times, though, we found Music Maker 14 confusing and overwhelming.

Magix Vst Plugin Vita