M-Audio Session

Get ready to open up your hard drive and say, “ahhh,” as the first thing you “create” with M-Audio’s Session is 3.5 gigabytes of wasted space. On the plus side, the program comes with a great variety of audio loops—enough to fulfill a beginning musician’s needs. If you can’t play any instruments at all, then screwing around with the timings and pitches of the premade WAV files is pretty fulfilling—especially when you start conjuring up some audio absurdities, like a country-electronica piece.

The program gives amateur musicians the chance to record tracks and then blend them into their own compositions. Unfortunately, that’s just about where Session’s usefulness stops. Unless you’re tinkering with a MIDI file, Session is a pathetic audio editor—you had best play your song’s dynamics perfectly, as Session doesn’t let you adjust the volume of specific parts of a track. You get a bunch of effects to play with, but the lack of basics is rather surprising—no fade-in or fade-out on individual tracks? Even Audacity, an open-source multitrack audio-editing program has that!

It doesn’t get much more basic than Session, but if you’re starting with absolutely zero experience, it could be worth your cash.