SmartSound 1.6
Review by David Nerlich

SmartSound offers you the quickest,simplest and perhaps the least creative way to construct a customised musical score for film video or multimedia.

SmartSound takes a building block approach to composition, breaking extended royalty free music in various styles into loopable, interchangable blocks that can be arranged on a timeline. The tone of the music library is glitzy and corporate but if your motto is fuck art, lets pay the rent and standard royalty free music collections don't give you the flexibility you want in a tight editing situation, then SmartSound could be for you.

Once you've nominated a musical style the SmartSound editor puts at your disposal a pallette of music blocks - in effect a 1 to 2 minute composition sliced up like a loaf of bread. You then arrange and rearrange the sequence of blocks until you have something that works. This is actually reasonable fun and if you're cheeky enough you could bill youself as the arranger. For the extra lazy or extra clueless, or more likely if you're in a hurry and just don't care, you can churn out a whole piece by letting the maestro window take you through an interactive Q&A. It asks for specs on duration, genre and mood and voila! - a custom sequence is ready laid out for you. Roll over Beethoven!

SmartSound provides updating graphical hints and warnings as to what sound blocks are likely to connect most successfully with others. Ignoring this advice may yield quirky but usable results. Any dodgy transitions can also be doctored by 'smoothing' or crossfading.

You can import a thumbnail filmstrip of your footage into the timeline as a guide, although you don't get to see the movie playing with the music as you work. For that youll have to export your arrangement as an audio file and take it into your film or video edit.

There is a range of sound effects as well as music to select from but it wont be long before you've exhausted the variety of themes. SmartSound markets a range of additional CD's to expand your musical pallette. You can also create and import your own soundfiles or lift sections of music from CD's but you may be working hard to get items that gel in terms of pitch and timing in the way that the loopable SmartSound factory blocks are designed to do. And if youre producing original music and are already in command of a music production system with a sequencer then SmartSound's editing tools probably wont have a lot extra to offer.

for more info: www.smartsound.com or call Draco Systems Australia on 07 3848 3400.