Mix-Up Your Musical Gift Giving (NAPSA)—A great gift for music fans may be one that lets them both play and play with their favorite songs. Today, recording technology can be used on PCs to do virtually anything musical—from recording an original composition to creating a soundtrack for home movies —evenif users are less than musically inclined. For example, new software from Cakewalk is available that lets people use their PCs to play DJ artist at home. Thetechnology, called Plasma, works with a joystick (the same technology that helps make so many video games easy to control) to let music lovers “morph” together sound bytes, effects or musical clips into one streaming segment. The segments can then be e- mailed to friends, or used to create soundtracks or music videos. A 30-day trial version of Cakewalk Pyro MP3/CD Maker software comes with Plasma. It lets users save songs and remixes as MP3 files, or even burn them to CD. It can be a fun and easy way for people to create their own party remix CDs and DJ playlists. Plasma can be run on Windows XP as well as 2000/Me/98, and works with any Windows sound card. New technology lets music fans play PC-DJs from their home computers. The package, which is available for less than fifty dollars, includes drag-and-drop looping tools that let users create and lay continuous backgroundtracks, as well as a complete ACID-format audio loop and effects library from which to sample sounds and music. While Plasma requires no musical experience, music-minded users can record, sample and mix pre-existing audio, or record music they make on their own instruments and then play it back on their homestereos. For more information, visit www.cakewalk.com/plasmaor call 888-CAKEWALK.
