Microsoft Research Songsmith Review

Last year when I reviewed Autocollage 2008, a Microsoft Research product, I noted the program for its wonderful ability, albeit a few personal complaints, to intelligently and seemlessly create collages of your images. However, the major stumbling block for me was its price tag, with the product selling for US$20 and the same numerical value of €20 in Europe despite the radical difference in exchange rates. My personal recommendation was enjoy the trial while it lasted, because unless you’re constantly trying to create collages, it didn’t seem worth the expense.

Now at the start of 2009, Microsoft Research have again unveiled another product with an interesting premise: a program that takes your singing and creates a customised backing track for you, complete with simple genre and instrument selection for complete beginners and more advanced options such as the ability to adjust the duration and key of chords for the musically educated. Songsmith sort of works like reverse karaoke – instead of singing along with predefined music, you make up the lines, and the program creates the music. However, the product ultimately doesn’t meet the intricacy needed for professionals, while beginners will become frustrated with the uniqueness of the musical tracks. To top it all off, Microsoft are charging US$29.95 in the States and once again the senseless rip-off price of €29.95 for Europeans. To sum it up, after recording one or two songs even if you use up your generous 6 hour limit playing around with their trial version available here, you’ll probably realise that Microsoft Research Songsmith doesn’t cut it for just about anyone.

While Songsmith try to keep the recording process as simple as possible, anyone aiming for decent results will become frustrated by the extremely limited audio editing features.

After you start a new song in Songsmith, you are presented with the option to begin recording. There are no fancy importing options, audio editing or talent generators here – simply hit the big red button and sing. Assuming you’ve configured your microphone settings correctly, the program will count you in for two bars, and then you sing your song. If you don’t like it, you can’t simply slice a section and start from there – you need to manually hit the big red button and sing again. The included feature for “the complete music to play back so that you can sing over the top” as its called in the documentation really is no replacement for simple editing tools, and this will probably frustrate anyone wanting their song to sound anywhere above somewhat average.

After recording your song, Songsmith gives you a variety of limited options as to what you can do with your music. However, apart from the straightforward options to alter minor settings like altering the tempo, as well as your voice and master volumes, many of the options present flaws of one kind or the other.

I'd admit there's a little variation between the styles, but I can't help but feel all of these 'styles' sound extremely similar at their core.

The main customisation option front and centre is the ability to change the ’style’ of your music, which gives you an endless list of different genres you can select from. Each style has a different default beats-per-bar and temp setting, as well as providing a different default set of instruments. You’re more than welcome to adjust these instrumental choices through the mixer, although the best sounding choices seem to have already been configured by the Songsmith team. At first each of these styles sound great, and they’re certainly quite impressive the first time you hear them. As mentioned by Microsoft Research, the instrumental tracks come from the professional music company Garritan who provide computer generated tracks to a variety of higher end applications like Sony Acid and Finale, and are selling more styles for the program at a cost of US$9.99 on their website.

While you can create you own musical configurations or purchase them from Garritan, there's very little point since any changes here either make virtually no difference or make the song sound worse than the defaults.

While these options certainly sound good, the huge downside to the program is the repetitive nature of all of the different options. Aside from the different instruments and the key being played, the music between all of the styles are essentially the same, and after using them once or twice, you’ll definitely be able to pick the similarities in sound between all of the styles. If you’re using the tracks for a one-off purpose, then they might be okay since the other person probably hasn’t heard anything like the pre-defined riff, although if you try creating multiple songs with the program for them, it’ll be obvious they ultimately come from the same general music creation algorithm. Microsoft say that advanced users will enjoy listening to the various chords so that they can gain inspiration for their own music. However, if this is the primary reason you tried the program, you’ll undoubtedly come away disappointed since the same overall melody will play in spite of whatever options you select.

Other options which you have available to you to change the key of the song include the ability to make your song sound happy or jazzy, which are beginner codes for making the song more major or minor, as well as introducing flats and sharps. There are other manual options for adjusting this as well including the ability to manually change the key of a bar or have the program suggest alternatives, although generally the program does a decent job of pre-configuring these options for you.

You also have other basic structural options available to change the you such as adjusting the chords per bar, and adding and removing bars from the start and end of your song. However, these features are frustratingly limited, and only give you certain predefined options, for example the inability to remove any bar in the song regardless of its position.

So unlike the more upbeat recommendation I delivered for Autocollage 2008, I think that after about 20 minutes with the trial, you’ll have seen everything you’d need in order to work out that Microsoft Research Songsmith is nothing more than a one-hit wonder. The purchase of Songsmith can only be justified for younger, inexperienced musicians who simply want to hear their voice play along with a somewhat varied accompanyment, and don’t care about the constant repetition between songs or the dumbed down audio controls. Making music sound good isn’t easy, and while its admirable that Songsmith tries to assist beginner musicians, no price is a good supplement for talent.

My Rating: 1/5 Stars