Magix Music Maker 15 review

Magix Music Maker 14 fared less than brilliantly when we reviewed it in Labs, Shopper 240.

It certainly didn't lack features, many of which were surprisingly powerful, but they were swamped by an excess of less useful tools, all wrapped up in an interface that was at odds with its beginner-friendly pricing. This latest version attempts to improve ease of use rather than just piling on more new features.

Music Maker 15 looks cleaner and more inviting than its predecessor, with less toolbars and tabs to contend with. However, we had to disable the so-called EasyMode, which hid essential features such as the mixer and virtual instrument library from view. Even so, basic tasks such as arranging samples and balancing volumes were easy to achieve. The new InfoBox window shows a short description of whatever feature the mouse is currently hovering over, although some features are poorly described or omitted.

Among the other improvements is a new sound archive of samples and MIDI phrases. They're well organised by genre and instrument, and have meaningful names, but the 1,785 clips don't offer much variety for those who want to work within a specific genre. We also found that some samples couldn't be imported.

Sadly, Magix's efforts to make Music Maker feel more approachable don't extend to tidying up the effects implementation. Experienced users will appreciate how an effect can be applied either to the entire mix, a collection of channels, a specific channel or a single audio sample or recording, but this is likely to baffle beginners. To make things worse, these four effect groups are accessed via nine sets of controls. The result is a tendency for confusion, even for experienced music producers. It's particularly disappointing because many of the effects are extremely impressive, such as the high-quality pitch shifting and a vocoder for combining the pitch of one sound with the tone of another. Unfortunately, it's hard to find these gems buried among the myriad of less impressive effects.

Our biggest concern is that Music Maker recorded audio out of time with the rest of the project in our tests. Sound cards and audio software take a few milliseconds to process audio streams, so it's common for there to be a slight echo when recording audio and monitoring it through the software rather than the sound card's mixer. As such, it's vital that the software compensates for this after recording so that everything plays back in tight synchronisation. Sadly, Music Maker failed to do so in our tests using both the standard DirectSound audio driver and an ASIO driver designed for recording applications. This resulted in recordings being played back a few milliseconds later than the rest of the project.

If you just want to have some fun with some musical gadgets, then Music Maker will keep you occupied for months. However, those focusing on creating a specific sound will quickly become frustrated by its quirks. For a friendly, low-cost introduction to music production with room to grow, we recommend Sony's Acid Music Studio 7.