Dear Michael

The shortage of styles is a "short-term" problem. The styles that are available are more flexible than hardware styles. For example, they support probabilistic selection of riffs, so they are less monotonous.

In addition, Jammer Live makes it easy to mix parts of different styles. Yamaha lets you make a new style that mixes parts from different styles. But Jammer makes this much easier--it qualifies as a performance feature, not just a programming feature.

Conversion of styles, while not automated, is straightforward. The Jammer Live sytle format is a superset of Yamaha's. A Yamaha style basically includes instruments and parts. The instruments corresponding to JL's musician styles, and what the instruments play during a Yamaha part are JLs riffs. In the absence of a CASM converter, there will be tweaking necessary to get the style to function correctly. However, I would guess that all the CASM capabilities are provided in plain English by JL.

Further, Band In the Box styles should convert pretty well to JL. This would give a source of probabilistic styles.

I think the software autoaccompaniment future is bright.

Clif