Sequel review

Every single review of Sequel is honour bound to mention its conceptual and cosmetic similarity to GarageBand. It's a fair cop. So with that out of the way, what else does Steinberg's consumer-friendly music-making app have to offer?

For a start, 6GB of loop and instrument content. It's a massive install, covering pretty much every imaginable musical style (no, really), although fortunately the library can be dumped onto an external drive. Furthermore, Sequel works perfectly well without it, so you could even install just the basic application and use it to record and cut up your own sounds.

While Sequel's target audience may never stray beyond this bundled content, the audio recording quality is a respectable 24-bit/44.1KHz quality (using 32-bit floating point internal resolution) and eight tracks can be handled simultaneously. Standard Midi files (SMF) can also be imported, so performances captured elsewhere can be used to trigger Sequel's onboard instruments.

Sequel's Media Bay facilitates keyword-based loop browsing, working exactly like GarageBand's Loop Browser. Want dissonant jazz snare drum beats? A processed electric blues organ? Seek and ye shall probably find. Importing files is the usual drag-and-drop affair from a Finder window and the project automatically sets the key and tempo according to the first loop you drop onto a track.

Sequel's interface is seductively minimalistic, augmented by a sprinkling of helpful hieroglyphs supported by mouse-over tool tips, everything purpose-designed to cause as little confusion as possible.

Everything takes place within one window, but Sequel's twist is a tabbed approach to access the detailed information in its MultiZone. Here, you control the overall mixer, individual track parameters, waveform editing (cut and paste, looping and timestretching), plug-in effects and the behaviour of the Arranger Mode. Using the latter, you can assign sections of your song to the 16 colour-coded Arranger pads and then trigger each one at will.

You are stuck with using Sequel's built-in effects, but it's a decent collection of signal-processing tools. Automation of volume, pan, mute, EQ, bypass and all effect parameters is possible, too. At your project's end, it can be exported in the typical formats, plus there's a neat one-step export to iTunes function as MP3, AAC or Apple Lossless.

There is bad news. Sequel's performance is horrible on anything less than a G5. There's currently no project export route to Cubase, unlike Logic's accommodating nature with GarageBand projects. Video support is missing. No external plug-ins can be deployed. And then there's the price: Sequel costs £75, whereas GarageBand is £55 as part of iLife '06 or free with a new Mac.

So it's by no means perfect, but then this is only version 1.0. On balance, Sequel is already more intuitive, more useful, more inspiring and more fun than GarageBand. Price is an important factor, though, so it remains to be seen how successful it is.