Songsmith

Songsmith is an audio application designed by Microsoft for producing backing music. It is able to automatically generate musical accompaniment for your voice.

The GUI looks clean and well structured. You can opt for creating a new song or importing several examples. It is easy to work with Songsmith because you only need to choose a preferred musical style and plug in your microphone in order to make the tool create backing music for you.

You can access an online help manual in case you want to find out more about the program’s features or have a look at tooltips that offer short descriptions when you hover your mouse cursor over a particular parameter.

Songsmith gives you the possibility to set up multiple chords on a canvas, each one with its own settings. You can lock bars, edit them by assigning a musical note, clear the current chord, and suggest other notes.

What’s more, you are allowed to choose between different musical styles (e.g. Reggae, Techno, Salsa, Rock, Pop, Dance, Piano Ballad), change the tempo of the songs, adjust the voice and master volume, and select the preferred instruments. Setting the ‘Happy’ or ‘Jazzy’ tone of a song can be done by adjusting the built-in sliders.

You can record a musical session and listen to it thanks to the integrated audio player. Plus, you can export the audio files (including vocals and music) to WMA, WAV or MIDI file format. The current musical project can be saved to a file on your computer so you can import it in the future.

Songsmith helps you undo your actions, automatically start the playback after recording, as well as set the default song style and tempo. Tests have shown that the application delivers very good output quality. It eats up from minimal up to moderate amount of system resources.

The final verdict is that Songsmith represents a great asset in the educational field because it empowers teachers to improve the learning process for subjects like music, math, history, foreign languages, and other ones using different musical styles. It is not powerful enough to provide songwriters a way to create music but it's rather helpful for educational and entertainment purposes.