simple program for kids

berenberen wrote on 5/4/2006, 10:12 PM

I usually post on the video board, and I really don't know much about audio at all, but perhaps someone here can help me out with this question. My wife is program director in a camp, and she's looking for a program that will allow a group of kids to record a song using different tracks, and then burn it to a CD. It should not have too steep of a learning curve; something kids can get into in a quick lesson or two, but with the ability to handle a number of tracks. And it should be relatively cheap. I've never used Mac's Garage Band, but from what I've heard of it, I think I'm looking for something like that, but for Windows. Thanks.

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 5/5/2006, 3:49 AM

How about Sound Forge Audio Studio for $69.95? Basically they would record and edit one song at a time and burn them one at a time in Track-At-Once mode, but the finished disc can contain multiple tracks. I think this is better for beginners because they'll focus on one thing at a time.
http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/Products/ShowProduct.asp?PID=975

ACID Studio is also $69.95 and has Disk-At-Once burning. The kids could assembe the whole album on the timeline, set track markers, and burn in one swoop. It doesn't have all the advanced audio manipulation of Sound Forge, but then again it will let you accomplish a lot of basic editing. And ... it also lets the kids play with loops, build up accompaniment tracks and percussion loops, and have tons of fun. Unlike Vegas, ACID Studio only allows one file per timeline track, so if they have lots of songs they'll have to have lots of tracks to add all the songs.
http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/Products/ShowProduct.asp?PID=971

JamTrax is only $19.95 and has a lot of the fun features of ACID. It will let them work with loops and record their own audio. It doesn't do CD burning, but they can export each song as a .wav file and use just about any CD burning software that they already have to burn an audio CD from these files.
http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/Products/ShowProduct.asp?PID=985

berenberen wrote on 5/5/2006, 10:34 AM

Thanks. I played with Audio Studio a bit last night, and found it difficult to work with, but that might just have been that I'm used to the Vegas interface. I'll check out Jamtrax.

I came across a free program called Reaper that seems quite decent and easy to use; here too, though, it might be my Vegas bias, as Reaper mimics the Vegas interface.

www.cockos.com/reaper