Details:
Price: $69
Produced by Stomp Inc.

System Requirements:
Pentium 300Mhz, equivalent processor or better
64MB RAM
20MB hard disk space
16 bit color, 1024x768 or better
Mouse or other pointing device
Microphone or other sound input device for recording
Sound card with speakers attached
Windows XP Home & Professional
Windows 2000 (including SR1)
Windows NT 4.0, SR4 or later
Windows ME
Windows 98 SE

Today I'm taking a quick look at the latest software product from our sponsors Stomp Inc. It's called My Sound Studio and is an easy to use fully featured digital audio recording, editing and mastering software prgoram. The software provides multi-track support and also a unique mixer and a library of powerful effects.

"Turn your PC into a recording studio. Use your sound card to record direct to your hard disk, then edit your music before recording it on to CD. Remove noise, customize volume levels and trim silence. Add effects such as Delay, Reverb, Pitch Shifting, Time Stretch and much more!"

At first glance the software seems very powerful with the ability to apply effects such as fade in/out, normalize, reverse, delay, noise reduction, envelope, smoothing, reverb, time stretch.. the list goes on but the point is that this software has a huge amount of functions and can do almost everything your normal mixing desk can so, just that its much easier to get the hang of and in some respects quicker. This software has been targeted at a whole range of people, so if your not a full on professional studio artist then its not a problem - you can pickup the basics just by click around and listening to the results. Easy! Lets start off by taking a look at the interface:

Here I have loaded an MP3 file, notice the Volume and Pan sliders.

"My Sound Studio supports the widest range of file formats available, including WAV, MP3, AIFF, PCM, Video for windows, AVI and many more"

This is an extremely useful feature of the software, it has the ability to manipulate audio files without the need for you to manually convert the file into WAV.

Now I have loaded the Mp3 I can apply the massive range of effects and also adjust the panning and volume of each individual track. The next thing to do is add some more tracks and see what we get. I selected some random Mp3s and imported them into the so called "mix"

The mix so far

Going very well so far, for a bit fun I'm going to try a pitch shift on part of the second track

The highlighted area is bit I am about to pitch shift

A really quite amusing mix is created, a banging beat backs some smurph type vocals. This is of course just to demonstrate the softwares ability to process Mp3 files, you would never normally want smurphs singing to a dance track.

Thats nice but what else can the software do?

There are to many effects to show you all of them in this review but here is a quick list:

Fade-In/Out
Envelope
Graphic Equalizer
Compressor
Noise Reduction
Delay
Reverb
Pitch Shift
Time Stretch
Modulator
Lo-Fi
Mixer

The software provides a mixer control which allows you to monitor the levels of each track and once again adjust volume and panning:

Mixer Control

Another key element in helping you get your mix just right is the controller, this displays the track time and is also home to the Stop/Play/Pause/Record buttons:

Controller

Conclusion

This software has stunning range of features that are easy to use, such as the noise reduction which I must say works very indeed. Most of the effects have sub-options that allow you to further configure an effect, you can then preview an effect before applying it - a very good time saving device as some effects can take a while on slower machines. There are some features that might be a little bit advanced for the non-professional user but the bulk of the program is straight foward. My Sound Studio costs just $69 which is very good compared to some similar packages such as cubase. The only bad points with the software are that it lacks some more advanced configuration settings but then you would expect this as the program is aimed at home users and boasts ease of use.

Overall this software is very good for sounds editing, mixing and general fun at an excellent price. More information is available over at Stomp as well as regular software upgrades.

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