What's so easy about food? We're talking about those famous sayings such as "easy as pie" or "a piece of cake." Have the engineers of these foolish utterances ever tried to produce a delicate short-crust pastry, or a light and fluffy sponge?

Obviously not, because if they had they'd know it's about as easy as being greased up with salmon paste and playing 'British Bulldog' with a family of starving grizzly bears. Our sole attempt at a marble cake made a better plinth than dessert.

The fact remains that the Cakewalk range is so-named because it aims to make musical matters a piece of the proverbial, particularly with this latest release. Using Kinetic, anybody can crank out a decent tune, with the possible exception of die-hard Status Quo fans (who will inevitably be confused by the presence of more than three chords).

Kinetic is based around laying down what it calls "grooves" (for reasons best known to itself, although we suspect the lead programmer might be a time-traveller from the 1970s). Each groove can consist of up to sixteen different tracks; a track being a drum, bass or synth sample.

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Putting a song together involves picking out the samples you like, placing them in tracks and combining any number of them to make a groove. These grooves can then be placed in the song window to form your masterpiece, in simple point-and-click fashion. Everything syncs itself up automatically and creating a techno anthem really is as easy as spilling a pint of lager over your priceless decks.

The various samples are drawn mainly from dance, techno and industrial themes, with a little hip-hop thrown in for good measure. They're quality affairs (including authentic Roland samples and the PSYN analogue synth) and you can tweak them using the basic track mixing controls, to pan the sound or adjust the volume relative to the rest of the tune.

It really is "cake" to knock out a pumping melody or two, although if you want to get more involved in the creation process there's a range of tools layered on top of these user-friendly foundations. The editing window allows the user to tweak any of the samples using a graph representation, clicking to add or remove notes; the really creative can build up their own samples from scratch here.

Kinetic features an extensive suite of audio effects. Whether you want to run your music through a compressor, chorus or distortion pedals, a flanger or some more complex effects panels with tons of knobs to fiddle with, there are loads to choose from. Even non-technical folk can get some mileage from these, purely on an experimental basis.

There are also lots of little extras, such as the option to hook a MIDI keyboard up and play directly within the program, and the facility to export finished songs as either MP3s or WAVs. It's also possible to play and arrange grooves in real-time, so if you were so inclined, you could perform a live DJ set with your PC.

Kinetic is an excellent program, particularly for music novices who will appreciate the ease with which competent composition is made possible. It's not a particularly cheap piece of software, but it's well worth the asking price.