It’s worth a look!!
For some time, I had been looking for a reasonably priced percussion sequencer. I had checked out Fruity Loops and a few others, but they were a bit pricey and more than I needed in Bells & Whistles. SInce I already use N-Track, I didn’t need all the additional recording functions of these other products.
I came upon a reasonably new product called Beatcraft from a company called Acoustica (www.acoustica.com). Beatcraft is an easy-to-use sequencer that allows creating percussion sequences from samples or loops. It provides a nice set of samples and loops to get started and works with third party 16 or 24-bit .wav and .ogg files. Some of the users have also contributed some really good templates they created that helped me get up to speed. The sequences can then be rendered as wave files that can be copied into N-Track.
The interface is really easy to work with and I was creating drum sequences in no time at all.
Keep in mind that it’s fairly new, but Acoustica is very responsive to feedback and enhancement requests like FaSoft.
The regular price is $40, but if you enter the discount code BACKBEAT, you can get it for half the price. There is a 5-day free trial, so you have nothing to lose in just checking out some of the existing samples and creating a few of your own.
I had played with drum machines and midi-sequencers before, but they always sounded too canned to me. There’s nothing like using real drum samples. Caution - Building drum sequences does become addictive. I was staying up until 4 in the morning last week playing with the program.
And no, I don’t get any type of kick-back from Acoustica. I just wanted to pass on what I had found to my fellow N-Track users.
Check it out.
- TJ
The organ player in my church gave me a copy of that program to try out because her son had it on the internet. But she does not know anything about anything and cannot even keep time even with a metronome playing in the earpiece I gave her. It is OK but very restrictive after using Fruity Loops. It might be OK for some people but I deleted it before the trial period had ended. I think people should try the demo side by side with Fruity Loops demo and decide for themsleves.
Gideon -
Have you had tried the July release which added more functionality?
I agree that Beatcraft is more limiting than Fruity Loops, but many of the features of FLs I did not need. It kinda reminds me of N-Track in it’s early days when it had to go up against the established products like Cakewalk, Cubase, or ProTools, etc. I bought N-Track early on and I have developed as the product matured. I’m hoping to see the samething happen with Beatcraft.
I’m a big believer that competition keeps all of the companies on their toes to continually improve their products and services. I’m pretty much a Microsoft/Windows person, but I am glad that Apple and Linux stays in the mix, not to mention all of the third party apps developers.
Like you said, Gideon, people should try it out against other similar products and decide which one fits their own perrsonal needs.
- TJ