Magix Music Maker 15 review

Not all musicians are in it for 15 minutes of fame, and not everyone wants music software that needs a science degree.

Magix Music Maker caters for the rest of us. It lacks advanced capabilities such as tempo changes and automated mixer settings, but is packed with features and focuses on fun.

This version comes with a new sound library of 1269 samples and 516 short MIDI phrases, the latter played by the bundled Vita software synthesizer. There are five other synthesizers too, including BeatBox 2, with its collection of fresh-sounding drum samples. It's easy to combine the sounds with your own performances, either with a MIDI keyboard or a microphone, and effects templates help newcomers get it all together without grappling with advanced mixing functions.

However, this brings us to our main criticism. While most features are friendly and approachable, there are simply too many of them, and a lot are superfluous. We counted nine different ways to apply an effect to a sound, some adjusting the same underlying settings and others entirely independent. As a result, we often struggled to work out how to adjust or remove existing effects.

Version 15 attempts to quell earlier criticisms of awkwardness. It starts in EasyMode, which looks less cluttered, but only because it hides various essential features. An InfoBox provides help as your mouse rolls over buttons, but most of the more complex features are strangely omitted. Sound Vision is a new way of viewing the supplied samples as 'galaxies' of colour-coded dots. It's a nice idea, but doesn't highlight the last dot that was clicked, so after finding a sample we liked, we struggled to locate it again to import it.

The clumsy interface is bad enough, but our biggest concern was that live performances were recorded slightly out of sync with the rest of the track, leading to sloppy timing. Music Maker has some likeable features, but ultimately they're outweighed by its weaknesses.