CNET Editors' review
For people who aren't musical, the process of composing and playing music seems almost magical. Virtual Musical Composer is a program that aims to bring the joys of musical creation to the tone-deaf masses. Although the program is fun to play with, be prepared to have very little control over the actual results.
The program's interface is somewhat abstruse, without any obvious menus or buttons. We finally realized that tiny arrows within the interface were what we were supposed to use to select our settings. To create a piece of music, we used the arrows to select our desired key signature, scale, motif mode, and phrase mode. If you're not sure what any of that means, don't expect Virtual Music Composer to enlighten you; the Help file may as well not even exist for all the information it provides. We chose our settings, clicked the Compose button, and waited a few minutes while Virtual Music Composer created our song. The result was a nice-sounding piano piece, although we have no idea if it had anything at all to do with the settings that we had selected. The songs are split into separate phrases, which can be saved individually, although you can save the entire song as well. This edition saves phrases and songs as WAV files, but MIDI files can be saved with an upgrade. Overall, we're not entirely sure what to make of Virtual Music Composer. Although it's easy to create music with it, it's hard to know if you've had much impact on the end result.
Virtual Music Composer installs and uninstalls without issues. We recommend this program to anyone who likes to experiment with music and doesn't mind a bit of ambiguity.
Publisher's Description
From LvB's X:
Computer generated music is a source of musical inspiration and ideas. Even if you aren't too familiar with computers, or you don't play a piano, guitar or create your own song in your own way. Virtual Music Composer produces its own completely new musical themes. Just listen to the music. Get ideas and be inspired. Musical tastes as personal preferences are mostly too subjective. As such they are different from each other. With regards to the subject matter, the estimation of a program efficiency is not a question about anyone's musical taste. All that counts is the amount of time you spend on listening to. Virtual Music Composer works on the basis "Just listen to the music". There's no doubt that everyone's favorite song comes soon or later.
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All versions:
3.3 starsout of 3 votes
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Current version:
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Results 1-2 of 2
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"No substitute for talent, fun to play with though"
Version: Virtual Music Composer 4.0
Pros
- Easy to use
- No learning curve at all
- Can inspire good themes for actual composers to useCons
- No substitute for actual talent
- Must play around with software for a while to get good results
- You must spend money to export to midi filesSummary
Overall this is quite a fun little product. The full versions are definitely NOT worth paying for, there is really no additional functionality you unlock -- it is extremely petty of the company to make you BUY the software just to export to midi files. You have to mess around with the product for a while in order to get decent-sounding results, but when you do get something good, it can create a theme or a motif that can sound very good indeed.
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"Urgh, cover your ears"
Version: Virtual Music Composer 4.0
Pros
A novelty product at best
Cons
The music produced was terrible
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