Dance Ejay 6 Reloaded music-making software

It's possible to buy music creation programs that cost hundreds of pounds, such as Cubase and Ableton. Dance Ejay, on the other hand, is available for around £15 online.

Cubase and Ableton are loaded with powerful editing features and are aimed at more experienced users, while Dance Ejay 6 Reloaded tries to cater for everyone, as long as they like hard dance music. The software encourages users to create tracks using a blend of the built-in sequencers, software drum machines and audio samples.

On starting the software for the first time, a demonstration track was loaded to show what it can do, though we found it more confusing than helpful. It was nice to see what the software could do but we would have liked a tutorial instead, as it's hard otherwise to know where to start.

We started our own project on a blank template (each of which can hold up to 48 tracks), and after a bit of nosing around discovered the virtual instruments, including a drum sequencer and synthesisers. The drum machine was easy to use and it didn't take long to start building up some beats. The sequencers for bass lines and melodies were reasonably powerful and there is lots of scope to play with the sounds and settings. There are some quick keys to aid navigation but these are hidden in a menu.

Finished tracks can be saved in various formats, and uploaded to the web accompanied by video.

People already familiar with the long-running Ejay series will get the most out of Dance Ejay 6 Reloaded. The basics are there but the software is hard to access and we found little help on the web and no useful instructions included with the software. It also has limited appeal to those wanting to create anything other than dance music in the trance genre.

Dance Ejay 6 Reloaded didn't run smoothly on our first test PC, despite it being well above the recommended system requirements, but it worked fine on another one we tried.

If you are prepared to persevere with Dance Ejay 6 Reloaded, and like trance music, it can be enjoyable. Otherwise we would recommend loop-based music software such as Magix Music Maker 16 as a better choice.