You may need to install WMP, if the music does not play! If using Firefox 0.8, read this to find out how to safely install the ActiveX plug-in for WMP.Most of these songs are created using Acid Pro 4.0 by Sony (formerly made by Sonic Foundry). With Acid Pro, you take loops containing rhythms or instruments, and piece them together into something that hopefully sounds decent. It's a music construction set! It's not quite paint-by-the-numbers, but it's far easier than coming up with your own beats and tweaking every sound module by hand. So, because it's faster, I can create techno-style songs quickly, which is entertaining to both create and listen to. If you think they sound decent and you are not worried about compromising your creativity, you might want to give it a try too. They used to (and may still) have a scaled-down entry-level version that you can try.
In the past, I have created music the hard way -- playing the notes, layering the tracks using multiple takes, and even tweaking individual instrument sounds. I enjoyed the satisfaction of making it all work, but it is very tedious and time-consuming, and I'm sure my lack of professional training holds me back (although, I'm just making pop-music, nothing too special :-) ). Obviously, with pre-made loops, it doesn't take as much skill, so it doesn't have the same satisfaction level, but at least I'm able to do something with my limited spare time.
In the future, I'd like to try to mix the two techniques -- use pre-generated loops for some elements of a song, while mixing with my own original loops. So far, I have not been too impressed with Acid Pro's MIDI editing capabilities.
I apologize in advance for the poor quality of the encoding. Limits on the web site don't allow me to use much larger files, and I also wanted to keep the size reasonable for those still using dial-up MODEMs.
Enjoy!
Gary
You may need to install WMP, if the music does not play! If using Firefox 0.8, read this to find out how to safely install the ActiveX plug-in for WMP.