For producers of musical shows, particularly in small towns and cities, it's a matter of economics - why pay for an entire orchestra when you can have a technician push a button to play back a digital recording, or a few musicians play digital samples of real instruments? The technology that lets a composer hear immediately the passages he's just written for the string or brass section is also replacing musicians in orchestra pits in theaters across the country. Still, as much power as these tools give to the individual, there are some aspects to the whole phenomenon of computer-made music that make me just a little uncomfortable. Some will even let you convert a digital audio clip to MIDI, so that you can correct the pitch without changing the tempo, and then change it back to digital audio again. With a sequencer (and a little extra hardware), you could record, edit and mix both MIDI data (Musical Instrument Digital Interface - information that tells the computer what note was struck and how long it lasts), as well as digital audio (vocals or other sounds that are stored as 1s and 0s on your hard disk). Other programs, called sequencers, like Cakewalk's Cakewalk Pro Audio 5 (for the PC), Opcodes's Studio Vision Pro or Mark of the Unicorn's Digital Performer (both for the Mac), turn your computer into a recording studio with as many as 256 tracks. ![]() With industrial-strength software like Coda's Finale (a high-end notation program), a composer can score a symphony (or a string quartet or jazz trio), hear any part of the work in progress, and then listen to the entire composition when it's finished, without ever having to hire musicians. It doesn't matter what kind of music you want to do, you can probably find software to help you do it. ![]() In the two or three years that I've been using various music software programs, I've been amazed at the number and their variety. Check out our Spring Sale live blog to see the latest deals as we discover them, or catch up with our roundup of the best Spring Sale deals we've found so far.Of all the things you can do with a personal computer, one of the coolest has to be making music. That's all for this deal, but there's plenty more gaming tech available on sale at the moment. All three are excellent choices and the other two drives cost a bit less even after this discount, but the 990 Pro is the one that performed the best for us in our testing - so I'd recommend it over these alternatives. There are few SSDs in the same ballpark, with only really the likes of the £150 WD SN850x and £165 Kingston Fury Renegade offering a similar level of performance with over 1M IOPS random speeds and over 7000MB/s sequential speeds. If you're picking it up for PS5 use, we recommend this cheap £8 heatsink that we've used extensively on PS5. With those kind of specs, it's perhaps no surprise that the 990 Pro comes in at the top of the charts when it comes to both our best PS5 SSD and best SSD for PC gaming recommendations after our real-world testing. However, its rapid game load times are a result of its excellent random performance, which is rated at up to 1.4M IOPS reads and 1.55M IOPS writes - for reference, that's more than double the speed of the best PCIe 3.0 SSD. ![]() The 990 Pro is a spec monster, rated for up to 7450MB/s reads and 6900MB/s writes and bumping up against the very limits of the PCIe 4.0 interface. ![]() For context, that's only £20 more than the 1TB model of this drive cost on debut last year. The fastest SSD we've ever tested for PC or PS5 is the Samsung 990 Pro - and today, this drive has dropped to £174 for a 2TB model after a 20 percent discount in Amazon's Spring Sale.
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