When Micro Rhythm became the utility to first crash its way into the charts way back at the beginning of this year. It was hailed as the cheapest drum kit in the history of the universe. £1.99 for a whole bundle of different sampled percussion sounds was certainly not something to be sneered at. Amazingly, Firebird has enhanced the program fourfold, but retained the £1.99 price tag. Now renamed Micro Rhythm+, it features not just one set of sampled sounds, but four. Crammed onto both sides of the cassette, you can choose from microlatin, microdisco, microvocal and microtune.

The first two sets are probably the closest thing to the original Micro Rhythm's set of sampled drum sounds and include bass, snare, handclap, crash and all the rest. Microtune includes some more melodic sounds in addition to the pure percussion stuff. But for sheer outright wackiness microvocal has to be heard to be believed. This section provides you with a selection of sampled voice sounds meddles with to such an extent it's almost hard to tell they ever belonged to a human being in the first place. They're weird, unnatural even. All four sets of sounds load as a separate program and each comes with some sample tunes composed presumably by the program's author, Simon Pick. You can play these tunes in their entirety, steal bars and incorporate them in your own compositions, take what's there and modify it, or start completely from scratch on a brand new beat.

As with its predecessor, Micro Rhythm+ has three operating modes; song write, bar write and real time mode. The last of these allows you to bash around on the keyboard, trying out each of the sampled sounds available. Because sampled sound consumes vast quantities of memory there are few variations, and depending on which section you have loaded, you will have between twelve and twenty or so different sounds to choose from. By far the most interesting is the microvocal set - modified human voice samples. When you get bored messing around with the keyboard you can move on to something more ambitious.

In bar write mode the individual sounds can be put together and you can compose bars of music. Notes of varying pitch can be placed on the bar with spaces between them to denote rests. Once your bar is composed you can play it to see how it sounds and you can in fact place, remove and alter notes on the bar while it's playing (your timing has to be pretty good though). As well as altering the pitch of the notes you can introduce 'flam'. This makes the note double beat with a short delay in between which can be tampered with for some wild effects.

Having composed all of the bars you need you can put them together in song write mode. Each bar is numbered and it's simply a case of typing in the bar numbers in the sequence you want them played. That's all there is to it. It's a simple program to use but a lot of fun. And if you play it through a hi-fi (via the audio video din socket at the back of the C64) it will not only sound ten times better, you can play a hundred times louder, ensuring maximum enjoyment for all the neighbours. If Micro Rhythm was a bargain, that makes this version an absolute giveaway. Make sure you get a copy.