BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. We are live in Anaheim for the 2008 Winter NAMM convention. I'm here with Dan Goldstein from...

DAN GOLDSTEIN: Acoustica.

BILL HOLLAND: ...Acoustica, and we're looking at -- this is the Mixcraft sequencer, correct?

DAN GOLDSTEIN: That's right. This is our new Mixcraft version 4, and it's designed to be full-featured audio sequencer. It does loops, Acidized and WAV loops, and Garageband loops as well. It does virtual instruments. It comes with a large library of virtual instruments. It comes with about two dozen audio effects. It comes with about a thousand sound effects for doing broadcasting, for doing podcasting, and the entire package which does MIDI, multitrack recording, everything you'd expect is S74.95 retail so it's by far the best bargain you'll find at NAMM but it's also really powerful and really easy to use.

So, I'll just give you a quick tour and show you some of the things. I'll just scratch the surface about what it can do, but we ship with some really unexpected instruments. This is our VB3 Hammond Organ emulator. It's a full-featured Hammond and Leslie emulator. This is our Minimoog emulator, MinimogueVA. It's a full-featured analog synthesizer emulator with programmable MIDI knobs so I can set up the knobs to respond to my controller keyboard and play then in real time. We have Impulse, which is our polyphonic analog synthesizer. It works like a Jupiter 8. Again, all of this stuff is included with Mixcraft. We have two, not one, but two 250 MB sampled grand pianos. They're triple-strike grand pianos, very professional. You might pay around $150 just for that from other companies, and that's included with Mixcraft. And then finally, we have the Acoustica Instruments, which is a general MIDI style sampled instrument collection that includes organs, pianos, guitars, drum kits, all kinds of synthesizers, everything you'd expect in a really well-put-together general MIDI style library.

And we do some things that you can't do in really any other software including splitting and layering of multiple virtual instruments on a track. So, you can take whatever instruments you have, split them across the keyboard, layer them across the keyboard. It will work with any VST instruments. It will work with any DirectX and VST plugins.

You can add whatever audio effects you want. These are the ones that are included. They include all the staples like chorus and reverb and delay, but we have a few surprises as well. There's a full featured master limiter. There's an amp simulator, which is really quite incredible. It lets you model different guitar cabinets, different microphones, and you can turn simple sounds like guitars and pianos into really wild distorted sounds.

And then, in addition, we have a big library of loops that are included with the software. These are Acid-style loops but they're organized by genre. So, if I wanted to make -- say I wanted to make a Hip Hop song, I could click on one of my Hip Hop styles, and I have drum loops, bass loops, guitar loops, record scratching, and they're all designed to fit together to create a single piece of music with variations. So, with a little effort, you can put together an entire musical composition with just the included loops.

We also have for broadcast work, for commercials, podcasting, any sort of broadcast production, we have a huge library of a thousand audio sound effects. These include things like burglar alarms, cars crashing, ambient sounds, so you can make it sound like a city or a town or the ocean front, and it's all really drag and drop, everything that you'd expect in really any audio editor: automated crossfading, snap to grid, really some pretty powerful MIDI recording and editing. So, I can play MIDI just like I can in Cakewalk, in Cubase. I can open it up in a piano roll editor. I can go in and change the notes around, move them around, double-click to edit every last detail about the velocity and the MIDI channel. I can even draw in all sorts of MIDI CC curves exactly like you'd expect in software that costs $400, $500, but again, Mixcraft for $75. It will work in any version of Windows from Windows 95 on up to Windows XP. We support professional ASIO drivers. We support Windows Vista's WaveRT drivers, and we're always adding more and more to the program, so we're very proud of our new version, and for $75 it really is the best steal you'll find in NAMM.