A SLEW OF COMPUTER PROGRAMS LETS ARMCHAIR DJS USE THEIR PCS TO PRETEND THEY'RE R DIDDY.

For decades, the guitar was the de rigueur accessory for the semi-musically inclined -- the slack-jawed stoner strumming "Stairway to Heaven" in the dorm stairwell looking to make friends. Cheap, portable and ubiquitous, it was the fantasy gateway from idle amateurism to rock stardom. Enter the digital age and a new fantasy musician: the armchair DJ. Technically (and techno-) savvy he's set up instead with a CD burner and MP3 recorder, passing on arena-rock stardom and feigning producer greatness of the Moby and P. Diddy order (at least among friends) by downloading and burning party CDs and mix compilations.

Now that the average PC comes with decent soundcards and sufficient processor speed, software manufacturers are taking desktop audio a step further, catering to amateur beatmakers and offering the promise of a "studio in a box" purportedly capable of turning out radio-ready songs. It's a smart move for software makers; with Madonna's postpartum techno-pop and P. Diddy's relentless sampling of '80s hits, the radio seems more and more the province of the computer auteur. And the demand for a consumer-end application is on the rise. Sonic Foundry has sold more than 1 million copies of its entry-level music-creation tool, Acid. We survey the latest offerings, from musical plaything to virtual studio.

Beatnik's Mixman StudioDL ($19.95) Mixman is more toy than production tool, but the price is novice-friendly. The central visual metaphor of the interface is a pair of turutables and a mixer - a peculiar choice given that the software doesn't emulate the act of DJing. Instead, it positions itself as a performance-oriented "remix" tool. In other words, with very little effort and no musical aptitude, you can force-feed your friends your homemade Night at the Roxbury-style dance drivel. Between the two virtual "turntables," you have 16 loops of prerecorded riffs or rhythms at your disposal. Additionally, a "recording studio" permits more-ambitious users to record snippets of their own CDs to be used as samples in songs. Since the software automatically matches the tempo of the loops to the song's tempo, the rhythmically challenged can still make passable tracks, particularly in repetition-friendly genres like jungle, house or hip-hop.

Sonic Foundry Acid Music 2.0 ($79.95) Like Mixman, Acid Music is loop-oriented and features the same automatic tempo-matching to compensate for musical shortcomings. But Acid is a genuine composition tool, which intuitively lets users "paint" samples into a visually logical arrangement, called a "sequence" - a sort of virtual sheet music immediately comprehensible by the nonmusician. Users can collage sounds together either from Acid's prerecorded loops or from samples they've recorded themselves. Think of it as a dance-floor version of Musique Concrete for Dummies. Still, it's a powerful enough tool that techno titan John Selway produced one of the tracks for his upcoming album using little more than Acid and a laptop.

MTV Music Generator ($19.99 PC, $49.99 PlayStation2, $34.95 PlayStation) The co-branding-savvy folks at Activision turn up the impress-your-friends quotient by including the ability to make videos alongside your musical creations. Sadly, the video aspect appears to be little more than a screensaver: fractallike graphics "dance" to your music. Music making is likewise a disappointment. It's similar to Acid in terms of arrangement, but the toocute interface makes the product awkward to use. Among the offerings here it's the only one that works with a standalone gaming console, but in the PlayStation incarnation it's particularly limited; the sampling of outside sound sources is possible only with the PlayStation2 MTV Music Generator 2 release, and then only with the additional purchase of a USB sampling peripheral.

Propellerhead Reason 1.0 ($399) The Lexus of the group, it's also the priciest - and the most difficult to use. Reason simulates an entire studio environment on your PC, replete with samplers, drum machines, synthesizers, effects processors and a mixer. A mouse click lets you add those sound modules to your studio, with the limit on added gear dictated by your computer's RAM and processor speed. It's impressively faithful to the look and feel of an actual studio; hitting the Tab key reveals the underside of your "studio" and how everything is currently "wired" together. It's expensive, but for a few hundred bucks (versus the few hundred bucks per hour it costs to rent studio time), it puts the dream of musical greatness within reach of budding producers.

Dan Balis (danbalis@hotmail.com) is a writer and musician in New York.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Standard Media International
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group