Hip Hop 4

As with other eJay titles you use a central console to drag and drop samples and riffs into pre-recorded percussive grooves. Samples are colour coordinated for ease of identification and simple control knobs allow you to alter volume, pitch and so forth. Making your own tune is thus a cinch: choose from one of the instrumental categories such as drums, keys, guitar and male or female vocals, slow things down and speed things up as you wish, perhaps chuck in a dash of ritzy drumming from the beat box or add your own vocals and there you are--Bob's your rockin' uncle.

Just in case the 4,000 included samples aren't sufficient, there are facilities for importing sound-bites too. These can be imported as .wav files, which makes for good quality CD burning, too. And when you're done with all that, wow your pals with a customised spray-paint logo, or create some DIY graffiti to use as background for the track list. As they say in eJay-land: EZ. --Sean Thomas

From the very start this program presented me problems: Even the installer program made my computer reset itself mid-way through installation, which is something that has never happened before or since. But even after I had got the program up and running I was quickly finding bugs in various places: Firstly, if you have been using the program for a long time, it can suddenly become innactive, with the buttons disappearing and the application refusing to close, more often than not I found myself having to use Ctrl+Alt+Delete to shut it down. Secondly, when it comes to exporting your tracks, the program is very slack, as s lot of the time it will export your song into a .WAV file which will contain no sound when it is later played, or it will insert a two second gap at the start of the song: This latter problem is not so much of a problem when you are making songs, but when you are using the program to create riffs such as drum loops for importing into another program, it is frustrating and unforgivavble. I use this program in conjunction with Cubase to produce songs and ofetn use Hip Hop 4's built in drum synthesizer, as it is superb (unlike Cubase's), but as if the problem of zero sound content within a sample wasn't bad enough, every time you restart Hip Hop 4, it resets all of the individual drum volume settings that you had defined (and saved) within the file, forcing you to have to put in extra work in order to get it sounding how it did: this is totally unnecessary, as even Hip Hop ejay 2 retained all of the volume settings within the files.

OK, problems aired. The main section of the program is fairly similar in structure, although you are now offered greater flexibility and freedom to alter individual samples and entire tracks as you see fit. The sound samples, aside from the suspect Vocal selection, are of a very high quality and can be used to great effect within compositions both internally and externally to the program. As I already mentioned, the drum synthesizer allows you to create your own beats and is a superb part of the program, but the ability to record your own vocals is even better. This facility has been greatly upgraded and now features excellent built-in noise reduction, allowing you to record crystal clear vocals to the beat you have created.

With this in mind, Hip Hop 4 is a nicely rounded package, featuring all the tools you need to produce your own rap, hip hop and rn'b tunes, but it is severely let down by a few niggling bugs that really should have been fixed before it's release. The bugs do not totally destroy the experience, but do greatly detract from an otherwise very competant package, which is a shame.