Acoustica has released Mixcraft 4
Acoustica has released Mixcraft 4 with MIDI support as it largest new feature. The download price is $64.95 which is a bit more expensive than Mixcraft 3. Mixcraft still has a 7 day trial.
My earlier comparisons between Sony Acid Music Studio 7 and Mixcraft 3 had Mixcraft winning on the usability and Sony Acid winning for MIDI support. With Mixcraft 4, Acoustica has evened the score on the MIDI front and they are still in the lead with the user interface. Sony Acid Music Studio 7 has been slightly less expensive, but both of these products should be considered a good deal and both are now good candidates to be your Garageband for Windows.
I’m adding a link to the purchase page for Mixcraft. From here you can get to the download page and the product details pages.
GarageBand for Windows 
They’ve done alot more than even the score. The included virtual instruments are amazing and Acid doesn’t give you anything.
Great!
Will test it soon.
i’m looking into making my own podcasts and just stumbled upon Mixcraft 4. I’m going to try it out. The GUI looks somewhat like Garageband, so that’s primarily why I’m going to try it!
Awesome!
Thanks mate!
the only problem is that acoustica is not on sale with a package all inclusive (DVD with loop and program)
I would second this. I have tried a lot of applications and Mixcraft is really good and does the job whilst being easy to use and understand.
Great program !
thanks for your blog entry! I was searching for something that was as garageband to mac as a software to windows!!
I’m testing it right now and its awesome!! many thanks for your research about this kind of softwares.! l8tr!
Theretofore says : I absolutely agree with this !
Better off with Garageband.
trakax is awesome… and free
As someone who grew up with Cubase but grew tired of the manuufacturer’s user-unfriendly policies I’ve been looking for a different (and simpler) package which allows me to record and edit MIDI tracks and live audio.
I tried Mixcraft 4 and I have to say that my experience hasn’t been great. So far it really doesn’t seem much better than a lot of the Shareware and Freeware out there. I’ve not tried recording Audio yet, but the MIDI recording and editing tools seem incredibly rudimentary to me, and I was amazed that I couldn’t even set the recorder to “count me in”, or loop sections between markers when recording so that I could record and overdub without starting and stopping the recording every time. Maybe it’s just that I’ve not found how to do these things, but there’s no mention in the “help” facility of a number of pretty basic features which I’d expect ANY recording/sequencing package to have.
Next stop is to try the Sony software mentioned on this blog.
D
Thanks for the review! I’ve been meaning to try out this for a while but I haven’t really found the inspiration. I’ll definately download the trial and give it a go!
Ideally, though, I’m going to get a Mac and use GarageBand eventually.
Thanks again for the info.
As a 10-year Mac user (I own serial number ….00000004 of the very first G4 line), I have started the process of leaving an older ProTools 5.2 and heading over to PC because of Acoustica. They’re improvements grow monumentally and their programming is so intuitive.
Thanks a lot, I’ll always be around, to search for “GarageBand for Windows”.
Thanks again.
Garageband is more expensive. Therefore, for cheap people like me, this > garageband.
thanks for the research!…i was looking for something exactly like this
mixcraft is the best. cheap and very user friendly.. if you’re having troubles on editing midi then you should try guitar pro then import the midi to mixcraft.. always works! haha.. have a listen to my samples
now they have released mixcraft 5 I will test soon
Hi! I was trying out Cubase 4 (which came with my Tascam interface) and found it extremely confusing. I’m not a muscleman or studio engineering. So I googled ‘garageband for windows’ and got a hit on your blog. I like what you’ve done so far – narrowing it down to two products.
I was wondering – what did you decide on? Have you looked at anything else lately?
thanks!
Linda
Sorry – I didn’t mean muscleman – gosh darn spell-checker!
I meant musician. I’m not a muscleman either 🙂
get sony acid xpress for free, almost like garageband