KRISTAL Audio Engine 1.0.1 reviews

For freeware, this is very very good. I used to use ACID Express (also free). ACID allows beat matching between all of the looped samples, so there's no tweaking to do. Kristal Audio Engine doesn't do this. However, Kristal includes effects and the capability to import other effects. ACID makes you pay for that function. The Kristal Audio Engine software is so easy to use that I didn't have to read the documentation to figure out how to use it. Of course this is probably due to my familiarity with the ACID products, and both ACID and Kristal Audio Engine are similar in many ways. Essentially, you can either import samples (drums, synth, etc.) and "loop" them in the editor. I plugged a guitar into an amp simulator (SansAmp GT-2) straight into the mic input of my laptop. The resulting mix sounds very good. The only problem is a latency issue, but this won't be an issue if you have an ASIO sound card, or if you install an ASIO driver for your existing sound card. You can find the driver online for free.

If you're looking for a cheap way to get into home recording (and free is quite cheap), Kristal Audio Engine should do the trick.