Introduction:
What if you want to compose music, arrange or remix songs, or make background music for your home videos? And suppose you don't want a really steep learning curve? Magix MX Premium does all that and a lot more. I am absolutely blown away by what this software can do, and within about a half an hour after installation, I had "composed" a percussion and synthesizer piece that would work for some videos of paintings that I had put together earlier.
The Premium package differs from the regular version with more sounds & loops, more genres (including a style suitable for movie music) more templates, a better mastering suite. More sound loops are included, and more can be downloaded, either for free or for purchase from the Magix (Catooh) website. There is a very realistic guitar sound suite (synthesizer) as well as electric bass. Also, you can do up to 96 tracks per compositions versus 64 for the standard version. In addition, you get an analog compressor and synthesizer, a copy of Music Editor 3 that can be used to edit samples, and the ability to mix tracks in 5.1 Surround Sound, again something that makes this version more appealing to amateur film makers.
The styles include hip-hop, ambient, chill, techno trance, alternative rock, blues, electro pop, downbeat electronic, minimal "tech house", movie score.
This version includes "cloud" space capability: you can store projects online space for access and editing them as well as sharing online in YouTube and Facebook. Media-X-change also lets you share data between other MAGIX apps. You get Vita Solo instruments --extremely realistic instrument sounds (the grand piano is fantastic) as well as a Loop Designer.
Installation:
This is a download version; I downloaded directly from Amazon, using our FIOS internet service. It took about 20 minutes to get the software downloaded, another 40 minutes or so to install an upgrade plus a number of sound loops and extras that come with the package. The installation went smoothly, if lengthily. You can download the software again, from your Amazon digital storage, if you need to restore it after a computer crash. You can download three times using one license key; after that, you need to correspond with Magix.
Using the Software:
There are two learning curves; a shallow one that lets you follow templates or "songmakers" to get up and running easily. Well, almost easily. I was able to compose, using pre-set loops, a very nice ambient percussion, vocal and synthesizer work with a repeating loop for part that is suitable for a home slide show. It took me a half an hour to get a pretty decent composition that would work for my video slide show.
I was also able to hook up an old MIDI capable Yamaha keyboard (a 15 yr old one) and use a new MIDI/USB cable and use the keyboard, loading in synthesizer instruments and play them on the keyboard rather than use the virtual keyboard in the software (I play piano, so I prefer a live keyboard.) That only took a bit longer.
The steep part of the curve is learning advanced mixing, equalizing and tweaking the sound using the editing portion as well as being able to understand wave forms to customize synthesizer sounds. Since I don't know much about sound and recording, I'm at a disadvantage. There is a lot of power, but I would need many tutorials to get to the point where I can optimize my music using all the features.
There are also video special effects and feature--presumably to sync music to your video work; have not tried it yet.
Reports are that version 18 (this one) is buggy, but I found it was rather smooth and if you are patient and do not try to hurry the process, the uptime seems acceptable. I crashed it once or twice in a few hours of use, which I consider average. (I've had much worse experience with some film-editing packages.)
There are some tutorials and demos. I didn't find them particularly excellent. You may find better ones on Youtube if you do a search.
Since you can upload your songs directly to almost any social network such as Facebook, YouTube, SoundCloud, there is an issue of royalty and copyrights. You can't publish videos to public sites that contain music you don't have the rights to use. You can however, use the compositions you make with Magix privately, although you can't sell any of the songs you may compose using the pre-composed elements in this software. (It's possible to buy some licensing rights on the Catooh website.) In any case, for most home use, the software will let you make movie music for your wedding video, stirring drum background for sports, or fun stuff for slide shows and any other multimedia ideas you may have.
Summary:
MORE FUN than you can imagine.
This is a very powerful music arranging and composing software, suited for home use due to licensing issues. You don't need to know how to read music but you will be able to compose songs, arrange and remix your own music fairly easily, within the limits of such a complex task.
System Requirements and Technical Details:
OS: Windows 7 (32 bit), Windows 7 (64 bit), Windows Vista (32 bit), Windows Vista (64 bit), Windows XP
Minimum Requirements:
Processor: Dual core processor with 2.0 GHz
RAM: 1 GB
Graphics card: Onboard graphics card with a screen resolution of at least 1024 x 768
Sound card: Internal sound card
Hard disk space: 4 GB free disk space for program installation
Optical drive: DVD drive (only for installation of the box version)
Recommended system requirements
System requirements for HD and Stereo3D editing
Processor: Intel® Core(tm) 2 quad processor with 2.83 GHz or higher
RAM: 4 GB
Graphic card: NVIDIA® GeForce® 8000 series and better (CUDA) or AMD® Radeon(tm) 5000 series and better (AMD Vision/OpenCL)
More information about graphics card support
Sound card (multi-channel sound card recommended for Surround sound editing)
Optical drive: Blu-ray burner to create Blu-ray Discs(tm)
Formats supported:
Supported import formats
Video: AVI, DV-AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, MTS, M2TS, MXV, MJPEG, QuickTime(tm), WMV(HD), MKV
Audio: WAV, MP3, OGG, WMA, MIDI, Dolby®Digital Stereo, Dolby®Digital 5.1
Pictures: JPEG, BMP, GIF, TIF, TGA (supports scanners and digital photo cameras (TWAIN)
Supported export formats
Video: AVI, DV-AVI, MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, QuickTime(tm), WMV(HD)
Audio: WAV, MP3, OGG, WMA, MIDI, Dolby®Digital Stereo, Dolby®Digital 5.1
Images: JPEG, BMP
Supported file extensions (import)
.avi, .dat, .evo, .m2v, .m1v, .h264, .mpv, .mpg, .mpeg, .mpg2, .mps, .mp2, .mpe, .m2s, .vdr, .vob, .mod, .vro, .ts, .trp, .tp, .m2t, .mpt, .mmv, .m2ts, .mts, .tod, .mov, .mp4, .dvr-ms, .asf, .pva, .mp4, .mpeg4, .mpeg-4, .m4v, .3gp, .3g2
Supported devices
FireWire interface: for use with DV/HDV camcorders
USB interface: for use with HD camcorders, cameras, digital video recorders, and webcams
Video, TV, or graphics cards with video input: for digitizing analog sources
TV tuner and DVB T/S tuner cards: for recording TV streams
Optical drives: Blu-ray, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-RAM, or CD-R/RW burners
Amazon Customer
Joanna D.