I'm on no side, but be pragmatic. Everything has it's day. The real reason right now is...financially to get rid of all the extra people at shows.

The business end is heavily weighted towards this. Click track you say? Well to run the light show you need either 30 people and controllers or ...a click track and a programmer.

I have done the manual lighting thing. 12 guys in a small room with over 100 big butt sliders, each one about 3 feet long with a twist know. You sheet followed the script and at this point you moved 1 to position 8 and 3 to position 4 bla blah blah. Loads of fun. Boat loads. Those par cans got mounted, pointed, gels stuck in the (sheets of hig temp plastic, I have 2 of these in my home studio. Each can is so hot you can feel it 10 feet away, like a heat lamp.)

Now all those lights can be led, midi driven, motorized and run off a pc running midi.

The average Joe can spend 800 bucks and get 4 par cans on a pole and light your show, right from Band in a Box. Which of us will use this? I have that gear, sort of. But setting up and running a show for $150 bucks, you are joking me.

So, the promise is the new version of midi will take the old commands in some string, run it on ethernet, or wireless, and the whole emphasis will shift.

Of course parts of the show may be done in the old midi and rendered to audio and messed with in a DAW, but that audio has to sync with a midi track.

I see the current version of midi too confusing for the new user, and it takes quite a while to learn it from scratch. It is after all a version of programming especially before there is sound, and then you become a sound engineer.

Most people just want to make music. RealTracks does that, and takes away complexity.

Map the future, follow the trends.

But the purpose of Band in a Box was not to spend hours messing with CC comannds to make a string track swell. You could spend a career on messing with strings tracks and make no music.

ASIO, MME, patch maps, chose you midi in, midi out, fix my usb, I can't hear the melody, I don't like the cowbell, wah WAH. Way too much time and effort to figure out joe's pc which he got from fred that is real good, and my wire is blue and goes there, and I have a 20 year old keyboard I got, (at a garage sale for 14$), and it doesn't work with the stupid software so I'm sending it back.

I just want to make music. If you remove the midi from the equation and market that as a separate program, and take away all the midi discussion, maybe you could sell 10,000 copies to 20 year olds who never heard of midi, all for $99 bucks. Almost no support. Sell add-ons.

John Conley
Musica est vita