Hyperscore
Who ever invented the ringtone market is a genius. Millions of people would rather download a song for free rather than paying for it, but many of those same people will pay $1 to get a fraction of the song on their phone. H-Lounge Hyperscore aims to even the odds a little, providing a tool and accompanying community to support creating your own ringtones. The app provides a slightly convoluted system for composing music for your phone, combining a drum beat generation tool and musical tone generator into a rather complex interface. Placing notes and beats in the interface is relatively simple, but resizing windows and lining everything up to sound productive is better left for a sequencing tool like Cubase or Project 5. This is an acceptable first effort for a content creation category desperate for tools, but I'll likely stick with converting my favorite songs using DataPilot Pix'n Tunes. I'd rather compose for a phone using something more like Apple's GarageBand or possibly Cakewalk Kinetic. In the long run, the company aims to make money sending your creations to a phone for a fee, but currently this feature remains free. The company asks for an email address on download, but there's no clear benefit to providing a valid address. [Windows 2k/XP $0.00]