Well, I imagine that the guys at Yamaha, Roland and Korg who code the OS doesn't design the styles either. The thing is, they hire a team of VERY talented style makers to do it for them, and the cost of doing this is defrayed by the retail price of the arranger.

If you have no time or inclination to design the styles yourself (and, to be honest, few of the Big 3's styles are done solely by one person, anyway, from what we are told), you need to hire someone to, at the very LEAST, tweak all the Yamaha and Roland styles to be shown to their best, and preferably, hire a style design team (or get MidiSpot or one of the other TOTL style makers to work for you) and design styles expressly for the best included sound set and VSTi's. Then, just like all the other manufacturers, you defray the cost of this into the total cost of the arranger, and finally you have something that the 99% of the arranger market (you know, the ones that DON'T make their own styles, no matter how much you WISH they would ) would be willing to buy.

Of course, this will bring up the price of the unit cost, but at least you wouldn't be missing the mark with the vast majority of arranger users that want to just PLAY, not spend AT LEAST 20 minutes (in real life, more like an hour for the average home user) on each and every style that's in it before it even sounds as good as an S900. 300 hours of style editing before you get something as balanced as a $1600 arranger... 7 1/2 WEEKS of a 40 hour week Two MONTHS of non-stop editing to get a measly 300 styles working!

So now we know why you haven't done this yourself (yet alone actually CREATE a style!)... And, truth is, none of us have a couple of months to devote to style editing before we can even use your arranger, either. If you haven't worked out by yet that the VAST majority of arranger buyers will NEVER spend that kind of time on editing and tweaking, you simply have done NO market research.... Rikki's style-MAKING group turned out that only 1% of THEM (a tiny percentage themselves of the overall arranger users group) actually made styles. How big a clue do you need...?

You are, in effect, trying to sell a computer that uses a non-standard OS, and trying to persuade people to buy it by saying that they will have to write their own programs Now maybe for YOU (as a code geek) this sounds like fun. Try it in the general population...

No, you already know this. We know this. Everybody knows this... How come you don't know what WE know, though? Without a HUGE library of already well-balanced styles and sounds, you are making a niche product for a tiny minority, and the minute the majors release an 'open' arranger (an inevitability, sooner or later) they will NOT ignore the content, and you will be GONE... If you tackle this now, you have a head start. If you don't, the first competitor that does will give you a VERY hard time.

I have said all along that I like the concept of your product. But the execution stinks. If all the cutting edge features were added to an already well-balanced arranger, I would be playing it already (and you would have my money and support, like Roland have now). But cutting edge features on an unusable (without MONTHS of tweaking at best) arranger will never persuade me, and the vast majority of arranger users. I sincerely wish you could see this, rectify the problem, so I could buy one