M-Audio Appeals to the Masses with Session
By Geoff Duncan
June 05, 2006
Wanna be a rock-and-roll star? M-Audio is bundling a new consumer-level music production application Sessions with its consumer audio recording projects.
Hoping to appeal to the same demographic enthralled with Apple's entry-level (but Mac-only) music production applications GarageBand, Avid Technology today announced that its M-Audio business unit will being shipping a new consumer-level, entry level music production application called Session with its Fast Track USB audio interface, and will soon bundle the program with other M-Audio consumer products.
Sessions will enable budding musicians, students, and music enthusiasts to get their feet wet in the world of digital music production, easily using their PCs to create loop-based music (built from layers of pre-recorded tracks and sounds) along with recording traditional musical instruments directly to their computer hard drives, all with a simple, user-friendly interface.
"Apple's GarageBand has done a wonderful job of bringing consumer music-creation to the Mac market," said Tony McCall, vice president of M-Audio's consumer group. "As a result, there's a huge contingent of users who are hungry for a PC-friendly solution, and M-Audio's Session software is exactly what those users have been waiting for. We designed Session from the ground up so that music enthusiasts would have an easy way to create their own music on a computer— with virtually no learning curve. The result is a fun, friendly application that lets people enjoy the creative process and quickly make music without getting caught up in technical details."
Users can built loop-based music from a 2 GB library of pre-recorded samples and tracks from a varety of musical genres—and users can vary their tempo and pitch to suit their track. Using a MIDI keyboard, users can also trigger and record sounds from a variety of music instruments using just the session software - no additional synthesizers, sample libraries, or other technologies are required. Using an audio interface (such as a mic input built into a PC, or an interface designed specifically for music instruments) users can record real-world music instruments and sounds—from bass and electric guitar, keyboards, singing, accordion, and anything else which can be captured with a microphone—right alongside other tracks. When users finish up a track, they can save songs to the PC or burn them to CD for easy sharing.
[On a personal note (as a long-time musician): while I haven't used Session, tools like Session are a great way for people of all ages to begin exploring digital audio, music composition, and production—and folks with some audio experience can produce near pro-level recordings with these tools. These programs can also be applied to other audio projects, like producing podcasts and interviews, as well as editing audio of all sorts.]