Microsoft’s SongSmith a worthy competitor to GarageBand?

I recently read a story on Digg about Microsoft’s new program SongSmith being a possible challenger to Apple’s GarageBand in the digital music creation arena. Having watched a few demos of the product, all I can say is that GarageBand has nothing to worry about. In fact, none of the programs that are designed for creating and looping music tracks has anything to fear from this product. At best, SongSmith would be a worthwhile download if it were freeware, but it is in no way worth actual money to anyone aside from small children who might find it amusing for an hour or so before moving on to more entertaining activities. 

Microsoft, in what appeared to be a desperate attempt to justify the product, made heavy use of stories where SongSmith was used to create jingles for ad agencies — as if small business owners might suddenly decide that they can just buy SongSmith and never have to pay advertising agencies again as they can just sing their own jingles and have them come out radio and TV worthy. It wouldn’t be that bad if the product actually worked, but even the advertisement for the product made it look inept as a music creation tool. 

The big selling feature seemed to be that you could make a song and then adjust it from being a happy song to a non-happy song without having to re-record anything; just slide the ‘happy’ slider back and forth and watch as your background music adjusts slightly in pitch and speed while never really bothering to sync up to the music. 

The product seems to be an evolution of the MySong project which, after watching the Microsoft video on YouTube for it, seemed even more terrible.

Here is the MySong video, and here is the SongSmith video for comparison.