eJay Virtual Sounds is a bundle of professional quality sound clips.

You get drum loops, FX, strings, bass lines, beats and even vocals. All clips are a few seconds long.

A budding producer has plenty to work with here; just drag the clips into a music editor such as Logic Express or GarageBand, and you can instantly start arranging your first dancefloor bomb.

Artistic freedom

The main selling point of Virtual Sounds is that the sound files are royalty-free, so any music made using them can be sold and handled with no commercial or artistic restraint.

Every type of modern music is here, from techno and house through to rock, hip-hop and reggae. Each DVD set carries 25,000 clips inside, which strikes us as more than you would ever want.

We dragged the .WAV files from the DVD into iTunes so we could preview some clips. Then we dragged the clips we liked to a new folder to keep them in one place.

When we reckoned we had enough to give Fat Boy Slim a run for his money, the contents of the second folder were dragged to GarageBand where we inserted them into timelines and started our quest for glory.

A comprehensive package

We've tinkered with music production over the years, and found that professionals recommend creating your own samples if you want to stand out, but they also note that it doesn't really matter where the sample comes from - it's your creative juices that count.

What we don't like about this release of Virtual Sounds is the huge amount of packaging used to ship just two DVDs. There's no download option available, presumably because no one fancies downloading 8GB at a time.

At £20 the price isn't excessive and, although there are other ways to get sounds to music editors, being able to take a few thousand bass lines off the shelf at a time is a great timesaver. Not a bad effort.

Hot on the heels of its massive Pro Pack For GarageBand, Zero-G's first Dance Pack boasts more than 11,000 samples ready for use in GarageBand, Soundtrack, Logic 7 and Final Cut Pro.

The pack consists of thousands of drum loops, percussion grooves, breakbeats, bass lines, synth loops, construction kits (singlehit drum sounds) and brass riffs aimed at musicians working with electronic dance styles.

Installation is a doddle; drag and drop a file, folder or group of folders from the DVD containing the loops over to your GarageBand loop browser and the sounds will be added to your Apple Loops library and index. Unsurprisingly, this package covers a narrower range of styles than the Pro Pack. While the other collection includes styles as diverse as reggae, trip-hop, techno, rock and pop, the Dance Pack focuses mainly on drum and bass, hip-hop, house and funk.

The 9,000 loops are provided as standard 16-bit (CD-quality) audio files and are accompanied by more than 2,000 single-hit samples of the same resolution. All of these are compatible with other software applications that can read AIFF audio files. The overall quality is good, but not exceptional.

Dance Pack 1 For GarageBand isn't the cheapest loops collection, but the sheer quantity of samples on offer - nearly 7GB - makes it good value for money. It is an ideal package for dance musicians looking to expand their loop libraries, and others who would like to add a selection of modern dance grooves to their existing sample collections.

You won't find anything groundbreaking here, but if you want to make authentic dance music, Dance Pack 1 will do. However, if you're more interested in musical variety, consider Zero-G's Pro Pack or Steinberg's Groove Agent 2. Cliff Douse

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