Summary - Audio quality is excellent. There is only a couple of samples with any noise, almost certainly noise from the machines being sampled from and not from any defect in the recording process, which overall is very polished.

Probably due to the market the CD is aimed at, Mixman, there are quite a lot of effects applied, especially to the vocals. Whilst not as noticeable as the K-Klass CD it may not be to everyone's taste. One can see why this has been done, the basic Mixman program doesn't have any built in effects, or facility to add them, so the producers have added the effects at the sample stage.

The collection shouldn't be thought of as purely a Mixman Studio product, though users of that program will benefit the most. Those using .Wav format won't have much work to do to introduce these sounds into their tracks, whilst audio samplists are catered for also with the audio CD version of the collection.

I do have to admit that that it is very straightforward to make a great sounding track from these samples, quite literally with Mixman, it can take 5 minutes to get a foot tapping track going. Therein also lies a difficulty, once your at that stage, introducing variation or originality is somewhat more difficult, if not impossible with the collection. Most people will certainly be looking to supplement the sounds with others to bring in something different.

Probably the person getting the most out of this collection would be someone new to sampling/Mixman, looking to make funk/disco like tracks. The loops and grooves are very light sounding compared to modern dance styles, and outside of the genre that the producers are aiming at there isn't much additional material to attract samplists.

As ever with a "budget" type release you wished there were more samples, I'd liked to have seen less of the Mixed Grooves and more variations, but you can't have everything, and you do get 3 different formats for your money.

This is a tough one to grade, on the plus side you get 3 versions, its a budget release, the Mixed Grooves are rather too complete for my liking, but do enable people to make up a track very easily, which is part of the attraction of the Mixman Studio program. On the down side there isn't a lot of individual components, and the sounds are a bit light and processed for my taste, but being objective that is how the sounds are supposed to be for the genre they're aimed at, a reviewers lot is not an easy one !

Overall - For Mixman users wanting to make funk/disco type tracks - 7.5/10, for other sample users - 7/10.

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Mixman is exclusively distributed by Time & Space, click here to visit their UK website, or US website.