You'll have the hippest hops around, or so FastTrak reckons, with its music package Hip Hop eJay 2. It's the snappily-titled follow up to the original Hip Hop eJay, and cultured fans are no doubt begging to ask the one-million dollar 'washing powder' question - what's new and improved about it?

First off though, it's time for a brief recap on exactly what the eJay series is, for the uninitiated. Essentially it's an easy-to-use drag-and-drop sample-based tune maker - you have a window full of tracks, and drag samples into it from a bank at the bottom.

Hip Hop eJay 2 features a 16-track mixer instead of an 8-track, so more complicated arrangements can be put together. It also boasts far more samples, with a huge 3,500 crammed onto the CD, and they're generally of a pretty good quality (although some are cringeworthy in terms of stereotyped Hip-Hop, and the language is over-colourful in places which makes this an '18' product).

There's a new scratch generator, which is a section that allows you to create your own custom scratches by moving the mouse as if it were your hand scratching the record - and very effective this is too. Special effects can also be added to the standard samples in the effects studio such as distortion, resonance and echo. There's decent scope for customisation, plus it's all easy to get to grips with.

All in all, Hip Hop eJay 2 is a very well designed and easy-to-use program aimed at beginners and intermediate users, albeit somewhat narrowly targeted, musically speaking.