Buzz could be described as the poor mans Reason, only that it's programmed using MOD-tracker style bars (basically step sequencing), which I personally find more intuitive for some reason.

It requires a lot of tinkering if you want to get decent sound out of the softsynths but when you've learned to handle all their little quirks (as you would have to when playing physical instruments) you can actually produce really banging songs at break-neck speed.

Good for all-electronic music, since all the physical modeling machines are pretty cheesy.

PROS: It's pretty easy to use once you get past the interface and learn all the keyboard shortcuts. Some of the soft-synths actually sound great, especially some of the additive ones.

CONS: It tends to crash when using some poorly written plugins. The end-mixing segment is also a bit plain. It's easy to end up with a dull mess unless you're careful.

BOTTOM LINE: You undoubtly get a lot more than what you pay for, since it's free (as in beer) but some functionality leave a lot to be desired. But for the price, it's pretty much unbeatable. Make sure you download some fresh soft-synths though, as the ones found in the default install are pretty basic.

First the good points: Programming-wise it's got a lot of flexibility- you can route effects however you want and everything can have a different value for each step. There are a *lot* of possibilities here if you're creative enough to explore them. You can set up very interesting stuff if you have the patience and ability.

But there are a lot of faults. First, it's prettymuch locked into 4/4 time. You can make a pattern any length you want but the fourth beat is always marked in the pattern editor- you can work around it but it's a pain. Worse, in the sequence arranger screen, working with odd pattern lengths or patterns with different lenghts becomes downright nightmarish. Another problem is the generator machines (soft synths). A lot of them just plain suck or are programmed badly (aliasing or DC offsets). A lot of them have interesting ideas but with these programming becomes more difficult. Each parameter slider only has a very short label and value for what's selected. So the best machines are the ones that are the hardest to figure out. The end result of this is that I program it like a synth novice trying to program a DX7- just mess with random parameters until it sounds decent enough. It's not like on hardware synths where you can get into the nuances of the synth architecture- the labeling is too cryptic for that. In the end the only really useable synths sound lousy without tons of effects. So it's probably a good idea to use samples. Also it's really not intuitive at all for making melodies. It may just be the way my mind works but I always had a hard time with entering notes from the computer keyboard- I understood it well enough and knew what keys put in different notes, but I never really got to the point where I could make effective use of it. Using a synth keyboard and realtime sequencer is a much better way to get your ideas out (at least for me) The final, and most awful flaw is the reliability. It crashes a lot. some machines make it crash, sometimes it just crashes. Save often. Sometimes one machine will screw up the sound completely and you'll have to restart the program to get it to sound right again. Some songs crash it upon loading them, others just won't load at all. Sometimes when you load a song it will just be a (unintentional) blast of noise. Sometimes it will even ruin a saved song forever. It's useable most of the time but I don't trust it for a second, and I would never use it live.

Overall it's a pretty good program. It's free, it's very flexible, and it can make some great and unusual sounds. But getting there ain't exactly fun.