Well MixCraft is an awesome program. I will have to post that MixCraft is much easier to use than Sonar. My students picked it up so quickly at the music tech camp! Everything about MixCraft is easy to use – the virtual instruments, the loops, and I’m really impressed with the beat matching/pitch matching function. We tried to do that with AudioSnap in Sonar and it just didn’t even come close to comparing to MixCraft. I love how you can right click on anything and go to “Make into Loop” and it just works! In Sonar, if you do that with a midi track, it adds time to the end of the loop if the loop ends before or after a measure, and then it’s impossible to get rid of the extra silence. Besides, “Groove Clip Looping” is a lot more difficult to remember than “Make Into Loop” – works well for my kids. I will say that I hear a lot of distortion on the upper frequencies with Mixcraft that I never noticed before with Sonar, but I think that may be because we’re using lower quality audio loops and turning everything into an MP3. The kids can’t tell the difference. The “Save As>MP3″ feature is also very nice! In Sonar, you have to export to audio, then we open it in iTunes, and go thru a bunch of hoops to conver to MP3. It’s great they have the mp3 encoder with MixCraft – makes everything so much easier! Everyone either listens to their music on an mp3 player or the computer these days – .wav is so old-fashioned! lol Hopefully we can get it approved and on our student computers asap.

I would also like to thank David Raimono for sending us 10 free copies of Acoustica’s MixCraft to hand out to the kids. Each kid got one and now they’re going to be able to continue to compose after camp is over!