Product Reviews

Empire Interactive's eJay range aims to bring music production to the masses. Various versions are already available to cater for techno, hip-hop, dance and R'n'B styles, but the new Virtual Music Studio (VMS) covers all of these genres with its library of over 15,000 sounds. Not bad for £30.

The interface looks slick, but tries a bit too hard to be trendy, and the swishy animations and beeps and fizzles that accompany your mouse clicks make it feel more like a game than creative software. It also means a modern graphics card (supporting DirectX 9.0c or later) is required, and motherboard-integrated graphics aren't supported at all. That rules out most laptops and quite a few low-end desktop PCs, which is a shame, since it's the kind of software you might well want to carry around with you or install on the old PC you passed on to the kids. It seems silly for the user interface of a music program to impose higher system requirements than the bit that actually produces the music.

Unlike with previous eJay products, Virtual Music Studio compositions aren't locked to a fixed tempo or key. Samples are automatically stretched to fit the project tempo, and can be pitched up and down too. You'll usually start a project by picking samples from the built-in browser and dragging them onto tracks.

The sample library is sorted by genre and type, the latter breaking sounds down into fairly specific groups such as male vocals in a major key or drum loops without a kick drum, so you

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should be able to find exactly what you want.

If it exists, that is. The quality of the samples is high in some areas but weak in others, both in terms of production values and musical credibility. As usual, the vocal snippets are particularly cringe-worthy. There's quite a lot of repetition, such as 340 robotic vocal samples including no less than ten virtually identical recordings of someone saying 'I have to go now' - which is hardly chart-topping material.

We also experienced a bug during testing that meant samples often couldn't be auditioned without importing them into a track first. Of course, until you've heard the sample you don't know if you want to import it.

Arrested development

The samples can be customised with a range of synthesiser-style controls, but it isn't possible to chop them up and rearrange them freely. Although basic synthesisers are included to allow you to write your own basslines and melodies, these can only be one bar long and must be drawn in with the mouse rather than played with a MIDI keyboard, so if you have even rudimentary playing skills you'll feel frustrated. eJay's Virtual DJ Decks allow for some interesting scratching-style effects, but the results are unpredictable and rarely impressive - again, something that might be fun to play with rather than a music production tool. Most disappointingly, it's not possible to record directly into the software while listening to the rest of your track, so you can't add a vocal or other live performance.

If you're happy just to give Virtual Music Studio a prod with the mouse and see what sounds come out, the experience can be a rewarding one. However, as soon as you start to come up with your own musical ideas, turning them into tracks is often going to prove awkward or impossible. For beginner-friendly software that provides enough power and flexibility to ensure you won't grow out of it quickly, you'd be better off going for Sony Acid Music Studio 7, which costs £36 from www.amazon.co.uk.