Simple music creation app?

[Humus]

Back in the good old days when techno/dance was the king of the music scene I recall I got a cool demo of an drag-n-drop style music creation application on the CD that came with a computer magazine. It was a really simply interface, you simply dragged and dropped drumbeats and synth samples into slots to produce your techno/dance kind of music. This was like 1996/1997 or so, back when much of the popular music sounded like it could actually have been produce in that app. It was pretty cool though, and good enough to produce some simple techno in matter of minutes. I seem to recall the name was "Easy DJ", but after googling and finding an app with that name it seems not to be the app in question. Does anyone have any idea what application I could be thinking of, or perhaps be able to suggest any other application that you'd be able to produce simple music with in without too much effort. I'm not really looking for a pro-app of some kind, just something that I can produce fairly simple stuff that would be suitable for instance as background music to my demos.

 

[Guden Oden]

If you remember the name of the magazine you could shoot off an email to it and ask (or the publisher, if the mag is no longer around - frankly after so many years it might well not be)...

 

[wireframe]

Argh...I think I know exactly the program you are talking about and looking at EZ-DJ I am inclined to say the interface looks familiar, but I don't think it's the one. The one I am thinking about lets you load samples on "pads" and then you sequence live by clicking the pads. IIRC you had two circles of pads, represented on a vinyl record image. So, you load up a tune and then you have these samples to play on top of it, so not a true sequencenser; you are not actually creating the music/beat, that is played from one or two tracks in the background, but you overlay samples on these tracks. I think I may still have it lying around on a mag disc somewhere. I am going to see if I can dig it up, though I think it was a shareware version.

How about eJay ? Maybe that's even the one you or I am thinking about.

 

[Diplo]

Hi Humus,

What you are probably looking for is something like Acid from Sony (formerly Sonic Foundry). There are different editions depending on your price range, costing from $40 upwards. Acid is loop-based with built in time-stretch and tempo-matching so you can mix, say, a 140 BPM drum loop with a 150BPM bassline loop without worrying about them not being in sync. The more expensive Acid Pro is, more-or-less, a fully fledged squencer and offers lots of extras.

Might I also suggest having a look at Reason. It's not loop-based (though you can use loops with it) but it's an amazing product and very intuitive (given what you can do with it). I've used it extensively over the years and it's the ideal tool for making music with, IMO.

You can download demos of both from the links I've included. Good luck

 

[Humus]

How about eJay ? Maybe that's even the one you or I am thinking about.

Thanks! Dance eJay is what I was looking for. I downloaded the demo, and it seems to a bit upgraded from the version I remember, but it seems to be in the same spirit.