Actually, back in the 80's and early 90's, there was quite a bit of it going on. Much if not most of it was being done on the Atari platform.

Cubase was born there, and if I remember correctly, so was Band in A Box. There were lots of other very cool apps too, some of which are long gone. Many of these apps were very simple, yet, even today, for just running midi based programs, or programming midi synths and editing patches, these old apps are still quite relevant.

Why today do they seem to be so complex ? My guess is the it's because of the multitude of technological advances, and the fact that many users want to be able to customize their own setups, and have an entire studio in a box or two. There is a lot of competiton today too, in a rather tight market. I'm pretty amazed at what can be done today on one machine, but I guess all of that brings complexity

Today, we can all go to forums that companies often frequent, and request different features, as well as submit both positive and negative feedback. This really didn't exist not so many years ago.

Just a sampling of this forum could speak volumes on if, for example, we all tried to accomplish a similar thing musically. My guess is that each member might have similar yet slightly to largely different approaches to the way they want to work.

The one other glaring thing is that the original General midi standard from back then hasn't really evolved at all, but different companies have gone in somewhat different directions in order to upgrade and try to keep it commensurte with technological advances..eg - Yamaha with XG, Roland with GS, etc. So it isn't quite so "standard" any more.

As a side note, a while back, I ran across Tim Conrardy's Atari midi site. His site hosts many of the old commercial Atari apps, and most have now been released as freeware. His site also hosts the old .tos images as well as Steem, which is an Atari emulator for PC. I was thrilled when I was able to install steem and run some of the old Atari apps. Great nostalgia.. and fun, but also, there are quite a few apps that I find to still be useful, so many years later. Great job Tim, and many thanks for it.

AJ

and now, once again because AJ can type a lot faster than his marginal brain can think..... once again...


[This message has been edited by Bluezplayer (edited 05-02-2005).]