responding to Mike: thanks for your nice words, do not worry about "Benno, don't let us discourage you from your mission. ....".
If I was not a thickskinned person I would not post to forums and mailinglists (where flames are on the order of day :-) ).
Anyway as you said feedback (both positive and negative) is very useful for improving a product, idea, system or an application.

Responding to trtjazz, I don't know about distribution since I'm a developer but I think after the NAMM it will be much easier to respond to your question. Anyway we will put up some video demos so you get an idea how it works.

Responding to "to the genesys": no PHD in rocketscience required. That would be quite suicidal from a marketing point of view.
Being open source, updateable via internet, providing big horsepower does not imply that this "luxury car" must be hard to drive.
Of course if you are a developer you can tweak any aspect of the system and if you want you can share (or even sell) your customizations or additional modules you write.
As for documentation, a basic manual will be there but since it is an ever evolving system paper risks aging quite fast. That's why we opted for online help (builtin in the keyboard, plus the docs will be on the web too so that non owners can take a peek to it too).
The online help is not static. It is interactive. Think of it like browsing webpages but with builtin pratical tutorial.

Let's take an example: I'm a newbie and want to learn how to use the MIDI/mp3 player.
Click on help->midi/mp3 player. read the short introduction, then click on tutorial and the Mediastation will automagically navigate the file menu, load an example .MID or MP3 file, start the playing, fiddle on the controls (on screen volume sliders) press pause, FFWD etc.
With this method you save hours of digging in the manual which greatly increases your initial productivity.
Not only will the Mediastation come with these tutorials, you can create your own one by simply pressing RECORD and then start using the the keyboard. When you are finished press FINISH and the tutorial is done. Afterwards you can even edit it (time stamped events) if you need to.
Such tutorials can be shared (via email) with other musicians or if you want you can even put them on a website and make them available for downloading or sell them.

Session management works the same way.
Need the midi player loaded with a certain MIDI file, track 1-5 muted, the style player set to Samba, the transpose of the keyboard set to -4 the sound on the keyboard set to Grand Piano program 1/variation 64 etc ?
The first time do all these things manually and then save the session to a file.
You can save an unlimited amount of sessions and recall them with a keystroke or out of a file selection. (cursor up/down for navigation, enter to select and load the session).

Does that sound like stuff for rocket science engineers ? :-)

Playing by the numbers does not make sense these days, dishonest practices are quickly uncovered thanks to broadly accessible mediums like the Internet.

PS: rumors are circulating that audio demos will be available in a few days, I'll keep you guys posted :-)

cheers,
Benno


[This message has been edited by sbenno (edited 11-12-2003).]