Techno eJay 4

ARRIVED IN GOOD TIME. ITEM MOST SATISFACTORY.

Techno 4 offers users the ability to create some very cool music, including either very slow, chillout or mysterious songs, club music or fast crazy beats. Either way, there are enough loops to be able to do this, and enough functions to be able to modify and tweak the sounds to how you would prefer to create that perfect song... or at least you would think so. I think the longest amount of time I have been able to go onto a function such as the FX studio or Vocoder etc, or even the mixing desk, has been about 5 minutes, evidently not long enough to get what you want done sufficiently. This is either because an error appears or and error occurs and simply closes the program without warning. OK if you save every minute, but lets face it, you forget at times, espcially when you are in the middle of creating a potential masterpiece. Hence you lose your work, which obviously is not good. This is on XP incidentally. Having said that, the quality of standard loops and sounds are pretty high, so still you can create some pretty good stuff without the aid of any advancing functions. The only thing I would like to see more of are spheres (layers); there are few long spheres that take the style of chillout or uplifting, so you are limited when trying to create a slow song like this. But this aside, good music can be made from the presets. If you KNOW that you will use the advanced functions, then, unless you can trust your computer, steer clear because they may not work. If not, you might find yourself enjoying every minute of this potentially excellent package.

I bought Techno 4 as a bolt on to Dance 6 really - once Techno 4 is installed you can instantly and permanently import all 4,000 samples into Dance 6 - and you can do the same with the 5,000 samples from Dance 5 if you have that too - you never need to actually load and use Techno 4 ever again! The bank of samples at first glance appears a little restricting - there are no standard chord sequences as in Dance 5 and Dance 6 but of course this is what "rave" and "techno" tracks are all about - hard, thumping and relentless and once you get the hang of it you can produce some pretty amazing stuff and of course it gives you more freedom. As far as flexibility is concerned you can tell that T4 was released after D5 and then D6 was released after that as eJay software is getting more and more flexible. If you put the T4 samples together with D5 and D6 samples you can create some very effective club tracks and for the price it's an absolute bargain! I run a P4 machine with 2.8 Ghz and 512mb RAM and XP and I have no problems running any of the software, D5 is a little bit unstable if you edit samples on the fly but D6 works like a dream and I've hardly used T4 as I access the samples from D6 but when I have used it it works fine.

Finally Ejay have given us the program we've been waiting for. The feeling that they produce "Toys" rather than music software has gone. Techno4 really gives you the chance to make some unique music. You no longer get the feeling you're just bolting samples together and that someone,somewhere, has made the same song! The possibilities with the generators is endless. Put in the time with this and you will be highly rewarded. Get ready to hear your sounds in your local club!

I'd love to be able to recommend Techno eJay 4. The samples are good, the facilities seem to be pretty decent too. But the thing is totally bug ridden. It runs slow as hell on my brand new 3.2 GHz, 2 GB memory PC! And when it does finally respond to the mouse clicks and you get part-way into a composition, it crashes- sometimes locking up the whole machine. From posts on the eJay forum, my problems are far from unique, especially if you are running Windows XP. Steer clear of this one- get Dance eJay 5 instead, it seems to be far more stable. Sadly you can't import the Techno eJay 4 samples into Dance eJay 5, which is more than a little annoying.

Techno Ejay 4 has the potential to be the ultimate electronic music making software for beginners. One major problem, its filled with bugs and glitches. The main problem Iv'e had using this software is the instability. You literally have to tip toe around in fear that it will get an error and crash your system. I have not been able to use it consistantly for more than 30 minutes without a crash. So its a good idea to save your work every few minutes. The snap to grid system is terrible. You sometimes have to drag and drop your sample 3, 4 maybe 5 times until it finds a proper place to snap. The copy and Paste feature is also not very user friendly. If the sample isent going to be placed right next to the copied sample it might just paste over another sample somewhere. The worst part about it is you might now know exactly where it lands. If it does that and you dont know what sample it replaced, then back to the sample archive you go. Importing your own samples is a disaster. They have to be the correct wav format (16 bit, 44.1khz) if not they wont import. On the plus side Techno Ejay 4 has a huge library of samples. The vocal samples are lacking as usual, but the rest are very usable. If you are into emb/industrial music, dont bother looking for heavy snares, sawtooths grinds or samples with heavey flange. This is a techno program after all.

Tested it on my 451mhz machine and also a new 2.4GHz machine both AMD and Intel and they are both super slow and pretty much un-usable. I am using XP on both machines. If you are looking for a good music start try Dance 3 - Dance 5, pretty good softwares, if you are a little more experienced, try director pro or director gold. (Extension Packs are recommended)

Good, thank you!