Considering how bad that Microsoft Songsmith ad was (we almost thought it was a fake), we didn't have high hopes for the product itself. And as usual, our low expectations were met, because the product is terrible. It's meant to generate musical accompaniment to match one's voice; these YouTube videos show the results of classic songs being fed into the program, with less than impressive results. (The machine must pass the sounds through its intestinal tract to produce what we hear.) That version of "Roxanne" sounds like something Buster Poindexter would have tried. The New York Times sort of tries to defend the program as something deliberate camp that went too far. But honestly, Kompressor met our "gimmicky synthesizer music" needs long ago, and at least that stuff was fun to listen to.

—Posted by David Kiefaber