AthTek DigiBand 1.8

Overview

Composing music requires not only a great deal of theoretical knowledge but also the necessary equipment and instruments. AthTek DigiBand will give you the power to compose music as if you had your own live band playing your songs! Although it can be customized manually, it’s highly automated and all options are preconfigured once you make a few initial settings. You can also import music files like midi, vsqx and ust and edit them afterwards.

Installation

To setup the program just follow a small number of easy steps and after a while the main installation process will begin. There are no settings throughout the steps, apart from the typical shortcut and installation directory ones. The installer contains no malware and is clean from any additional 3^rd party software as well.

Supported operating systems are Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

Interface

When you run the program you will see a small window which will ask you to choose between Automatic composition (Composition Guide) and Automatic accompaniment (Accompaniment Guide). In the first case a window will open which has several settings, including Emotion, BPM, Beat, Genre, Instruments, Preset types and Chord. The last one is automatically configured depending on the previous settings. When you finish, click on the “Auto composition” button to generate your song on the main window, which has a timeline at the top and the instruments that are used on the left.

In the second case you’ll be prompted to import a music file (or record a song) and DigiBand will automatically improvise an accompaniment to it.

Pros

As mentioned above, the Auto composition and Auto accompaniment are great features that do all the dirty work for you. They analyze your settings/music files/voice and automatically generate tracks that can be either kept as they are or used as reference and be manipulated. When you import music files you can also see details like section, chord and bar.

Supported instruments are guitar, piano, bass, string, drum (all of which have various types you can pick from), celesta, vibraphone, xylophone, trumpet and many others.

The files you can import in DigiBand can be of the following types: midi, vsqx (Vocaloid3, Hatsune Miku format), ust (UTAU format) and nn.

Digital singers, a Hatsune Mike-type of thing, is another feature of the program. They can sing vocals like a, ba, da, la and na.

Cons

The trial version has quite a lot of limitations: number of instrument tracks (6, 16 in pro version), number of preset structure types (3, 8 in pro), number of genres (1, all in pro), and you also can’t open a project, update band data, export midi/wave and customize structure.

Alternatives

There’s a slim chance that an alternative exists with all those features; however, for creating music by selecting beats and instruments FL Studio (paid) is one of the best and most popular software. Others are Reason (paid), Ableton Live (paid) and LLMS (Linux MultiMedia Studio, free).

Conclusion

AthTek DigiBand is a very unique application that will give you the chance to create music as you imagined it.