Aria Maestosa for Mac

With its collection of over a hundred musical instruments and advanced editing features, Aria Maestosa for Mac lets you compose and edit MIDI music files with ease. Featuring several easy-to-navigate views, it offers a good way to string notes together, whether you're an amateur or a serious producer. It can even interface with musical instruments connected via a MIDI port.

Following a quick installation, Aria Maestosa for Mac welcomes you with its main interface window containing a few of the most used options. The compose/edit view is not as heavily textured as that of GarageBand, but it's just as intuitive and approachable. You click and drag on note lines to create selections that you can then play back, and you can even drag selections around in order to adjust them while preserving their length. You'll like the support for multiple instruments on the same track and the relatively low resource consumption -- during playback this application requires only around ten percent of the CPU and no more than 30MB of RAM. It does top the charts on battery consumption, though, so editing while not plugged in might not be a great idea. Importing and exporting MIDI files takes no time at all: we were able to import and export a 60-second guitar solo in less than a second.

If you like recording music, you'll be pleased with Aria Maestosa for Mac. When you combine the clean interface with the vast array of instruments it offers, you get one of the better audio freeware options for Mac.