MasterWriter 1.0 is a songwriting toolkit designed for professional songwriters and musicians. Created by Grammy and Emmy award-winners Barry DeVorzon and Michael Towers, the overarching goal of this software suite is to fully utilize technology to aid intuitively, without interference, the process of songwriting. For organizing work in progress, you could think of this program as an extension of your mind's thought and creative processes. An advanced database with an elegant interface allows access to a unique set of rhyming, phrasal and informational reference dictionaries. Special dictionaries include Pop-Culture, Alliterations and a Thesaurus.

Having those features on my computer alone would make it worth the $289 MSRP but there is so much more that make MasterWriter the first program to fully address all of the challenges of writing a song. There is a complete word processor and 250 tempo-adjustable MIDI drum loop library for beat framework. Songwriter/producer Peter Rafelson (who helped me on this one) and I thought the built-in hard disc stereo audio recorder is perfect for trying out and keeping melodies handy at all times.

We liked the Rhymed-Phrases and Phrasal dictionaries with a collection of over 35,000 phrases, clichés, idioms, sayings and word combinations. The Rhymed-Phrases dictionary offers a way to look up phrases that rhyme with any single word. MasterWriter cross-references similar, but not exact rhymes the way lyricists tend to take liberties not found in traditional poetic rhyming dictionaries.

The Song Module aggregates in one place song lists, lyrics, audio clips, song information (creation date, publishing info, collaborators etc.) and Songuard™, an online date-of-creation song registration service. A renewable, one-year subscription comes with MasterWriter.

More than a simple adjunct, MasterWriter will help you stay in the purely creative mode by allowing access to an organized set of tools necessary for the 'craft' of songwriting. Although just in the early version 1.0 stage and in spite of some minor operational quirks and slow load times, MasterWriter looks to become the defacto standard in professional songwriting software. For MAC or PC, MasterWriter is available for $289 online at www.masterwriter.com or you can call them at 866-848-8484.