We all went round and round on the MS back when Dom was making them. It still boils down to content, and assembly. I mean, kudos for Ketron getting MUCH further down that road than Lionstracs ever did. They at least know, for the vast arranger market, you have to do most of the work for them! It takes skills that few players have to assemble all the pieces parts to make a good usable style out of audio loops.

Yamaha, OTOH, haven't even latched onto that basic fact, despite years of domination of the arranger market. Of what use is an audio loop arranger, when there are so FEW audio loops available for them? They wrap it in a proprietary shell so you can't get your own loops in even if you COULD make your own, and the one area where you CAN put your own content in, Yamaha forgot to make it loop!

In the meantime, MIDI arrangers continue to get better and better. Drum kits get more and more dynamic and live sounding, SA voices make legato parts more realistic, and a variety of 'guitar modes' make guitar parts more realistic (and able to play any chord!) and voicings more authentic.

Everything about MIDI styles is getting better, and we only have to wait a while for factory sample sizes to get bigger, and we will have nirvana! Admittedly, much of what we are waiting for CAN be done now, using the MIDI output of our arrangers and low latency VSTi rigs. But the main thing missing is the skill that the factory programmers show to tie it all together. Once the kits are made into factory presets, the style programmers will have something stable to work with, and then watch out!

I only see big things for MIDI arrangers in the next few years.