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What is it?

Music Director and Music Director PRO from eJay are music software packages that are similar to Acid Pro 3 that I reviewed last year. They offer a way of layering and manipulating samples to create your own music.

In addition to the audio editing functions, Music Director and Music Director PRO also provide video editing features. You can use photos and video clips to make your own music video. You can also edit all your video clips using fades and effects and then save the results as an AVI file.

System Requirements

To be able to fully use Music Director, your PC must satisfy the following requirements:

I tried it out on a Pentium III 450 with Windows 2000 and 196Mb, which worked fine until I started adding video when everything went a bit jerky – so I suspect if you are going heavily down the video route you will need something a bit more pokey. The 1024x768 resolution deal is for real, you cannot run this at 800x600 - the interface takes over your entire monitor including your task bar and you can’t resize the window it runs in.

Samples

More than 3,000 (10,000 with Pro version) samples are supplied with the software which are all categorised by tempo and genre. Genres are big beat, chillout, drum and bass, ethnic, experimental, hip hop, pop, trance and vocal house and they are all really good, even the vocal samples are not too cheesy which makes a change. I am a great believer in creating original samples from messing about in the kitchen, sampling vinyl and just generally using anything with an audio output. However, this sample library offers a perfect starting point, allowing you to create your first tracks quickly and in a number of different styles. Most of the samples are as yet unpublished and have all been produced exclusively for eJay by professional musicians and mastered in eJay’s own studios. I don’t know exactly what they mean by unpublished, presumably whoever makes the first number one hit using eJay’s samples will find out. Music Director Pro also includes a broad selection from eJay’s popular Sound Collections Vol. 3.

Getting Started

The software has a very attractive interface, but it’s a bit like using one of those really clever flash web sites where it takes a while to get the hang of where all the menus and navigation buttons are, for instance I usually expect to find the ‘open file’ command up in the top left hand corner rather than the right hand corner like it is here. Personally I prefer the more traditional windows kind of interface with pull down menus and floating toolbars, but this is really a personal taste thing.

There is a windows explorer style window to browse your PC for samples, all hard drives and folders are shown with a symbol and a small clicking field. You can listen to the sample simply by clicking on the file when you have the preview button in the main screen activated.

Samples are moved into the track window above using drag and drop. The position display on the beat bar is useful here, as it always shows the exact position at which the sample is currently located.

In the Pro version there is an automatic tempo correction facility, if the tempo of the sample you drag onto the audio tracks does not match the tempo of the song, it can be adjusted automatically, this is a really neat feature and can lead to some good effects by selecting samples that are completely the wrong tempo and then adjusting them to fit the track. Loading a sample into a song or altering the playback speed of the complete song are non-destructive processes. The original sample remains unchanged. Samples can be loaded in formats: WAV, MP3 and WMA and audio can be written as WAV, MP3 and WMA.

The Main Screen

This is where all the action happens, apart from the pure arrangement of samples and clips, curves can be set for volume and pan then edited to enable automatic changing of these parameters. A track consists essentially of two parts: the track information and the track itself. The track information is where the functions of the track can be defined and the status of the track can be read. On the tracks themselves, samples and clips are arranged and parameter curves are shown. You have scroll and scale bars on this main screen, but I don’t think they really allow the display to go small enough – I like to be able to see the whole song in its entirety rather than just the bit where the cursor is. In the Pro version you can group tracks together which is useful if you have something like a drum kit which is spread over several tracks and you want to control all its parameters in one hit.

Effects

Effects are handled in the FX studio. In the FX Studio, you assemble the FX to be used for your song. You can activate up to eight of these effects in so called slots. As soon as effects have been integrated in this way in the FX Studio, signals can be transmitted via the corresponding sends in the audio tracks, FX tracks and group tracks. In the FX Studio, you can activate the same effect in several slots, in order to use different settings. If you use either Cubase or Wavelab you will have some VST plug-in effects which, you’ll be glad to hear, are completely compatible.

The Mixer

The mixer is used for mixing the audio tracks and all other tracks, which contain audio signals, i.e. FX tracks and group tracks. Each track (audio, group (pro version only) and FX tracks, plus the master track) is displayed as a channel in the mixer. The audio signal is passed through this channel, so to speak, so that it can undergo direct editing there. Each channel is divided into the sections for EQ (pro version only), effects, pan, volume, route (pro version only) and name.

Time and Tune Generator

This is something I have never seen before; it’s basically a graphical device for timestretching samples. It’s a doddle to use, you just push a little circle thing around an axis for pitch and an axis for tempo, it’s neat and simple and it works.

Video

This kind of feature seems to be cropping up more and more on this kind of application, I’ve never really seen the point of it, but I suppose many will find it very useful. The concept is very similar to audio in that video clips are simply dragged from the explorer window onto the dedicated video tracks. If you have used anything like Adobe Premier for video editing then you know the general idea. There are a whole load of video transitions, FX and fades that you can just drag onto the tracks. As I said under systems requirements my PC did struggle with video on top of a fairly complex song, but I guess if you are really into your video you will have a pretty wicked machine anyway. The program reads MPEG and AVI and writes AVI.

Music Director or Music Director Pro?

Music Director is £39.99 and the Pro version is £79.99. If you look at the comparison chart you can see what extra features you get.

Function Music Director Music Director Pro

Also if you want the auto timestretching facility you need the Pro version. My own personal thoughts are that it is probably worth forty quid for the extra 7000 samples alone even if you don’t use the extra features. It was only a few years ago that audio sample CDs were being sold for nothing less than £50!

Conclusion

Value for money is exceptional here, to get something like this with VST plug-in compatibility and ability to edit video as well for less than £40 is really amazing. If money were not an object I would probably go for something like Acid Pro 3 instead, just because I find the interface a bit more user friendly. I wouldn’t buy this if my sole mission was to make music videos, but if you want to make your own tunes cheaply and easily using a computer and nothing else then this has to be the way to go.

Rick Lomas

March 2002