Virtual Music Composer for Windows

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.