Fun with Mixcraft

In preparation for the 48 I have been looking around online for public domain music. I'm also very curious about 'Garage Band', a piece of software available on the Mac which is apparently very easy to use to make your own music. I googled 'Garage Band for PC' again yesterday (having searched for it last year and found no satisfactory alternative for the PC) and was very please to find references to a program called 'Mixcraft'. The best part is that it has a free, fully working 14 day trial (something like a 45mb download). I've been playing with it this morning and it is, as it promised to be, fairly easy to use. I'm not so interested in looping recorded audio samples as I am in building music note by note in the program and then looping it. Mixcraft has a handy piano-roll interface for composing loops and plenty of midi instruments to choose from. It also appears to be a multi-track recorder, so you can construct a bunch of midi tracks and then record vocals or instruments into their own tracks, mix them and save to audio file (mp3 or whatever). There are probably a lot of these sorts of programs around and I've only played with a few but so far I'm impressed with Mixcraft. By the end of the holidays I should have some idea of whether I'm impressed enough to pay US$65 to register my copy. Apparently a lot of the functions still work in an unregistered copy post-trial, so I shall wait and see...