Hoochie

Interesting demo, although the cynic in me realizes they're only 80 miles apart, and running over some of the best network infrastructure in the country. It can't get better than this, and could certainly be worse. And, even them, I still hear a hint of delay in their timing. May be good enough for working out parts, but maybe not good to prep for live play. I happen to have first hand beta experience with this product. We started using it as the first test case of an entire band. At the time 2009-2010 you had to have a solid connection. I had fiber to the house rated at 25/200( crazy huh ). Some of the other people had DSL or cable. It worked to a point and then started breaking up. That point was about 4 devices. This was all in the greater SF Bay Area except me in Valley. When I say greater, for those that don't know, it's an area about 75 miles across with the bay smack in the center. It's huge. Driving from San Jose to Novato in Marin county can take an easy hour and a half. So it really saved us a lot of drive time and renting studios. Given the state of the internet now I think it would be far better. You can do skype conference calls now with 10 attendees no problem. Basically it was a little digital mixer that gave you a mic in, an instrument in, a mix/headphone out, and an Ethernet jack. There was a control server that it connected to in order to do all the digital mixing and your device was hosted off the server. You listened to yourself in real time and you could adjust the level of each far side thing in the GUI. Basically dial in your own mix. You could also drop the codec down a notch or two to slim down bandwidth. It got kind of Telephone quality but it worked. The interface was well thought out. It looks like it's still in production. Good for them. I should bust mine out and give it a spin. If I can find it. John

Wow. That's pretty cool. Some further thoughts on the action. Kurzweil spends a lot of time on the velocity aspect of each program. It shows in the relative feel of each category of Instrument. It's not just "Here is a velocity midi keyboard. Here is a module inside the keyboard. Here is light , medium, and heavy velocity curves. Pick one. Go" John

Tom, That was my thought too. You jangled a memory. It was an eye opener into how tunes were put together. I learned a lot from it too. John

There was a transcription book with all the parts charted for some of the entire albums. Horn charts and all. Every measure. If I can find it and it's in there it's going to be pretty close. I used it for doing Chicago tunes back then. I'm an ex trumpet player and I was surprised it was all in there. I'll bet those books are still available. They were hugely popular at that time with back to back top ten hits. And I still think Terry Kath is one of the best guitar players. Ever. Watching their early live stuff the whole band kicks serious ass. John

Its doable but I haven't tried yet. A coworker of mine was working on it for a dual boot that was transportable. You just take your stick and go. We like the PowerBook form factor and screen. And yes you can keep both Windows and OSX running on the Mac but this is truly Plug and Play. I'll ask him if he finished, how it's done, and what are the limitations. John Peterson DanL beat me to it. It sounds like you've tried this and it didn't fulfill your needs

The Artis German grand is very well done for its size. I ended up using the Japanese grand for everything though. It's way better than the CFX in the CP4 in my opinion. Just beautiful. The ep's, clav's, and such are likely loosing layers. Some of the new orchestral bells too. But, I think judging from the past whatever they do to cut back on sample size is still going to leave top notch sounds. I'm just super jazzed as a Forte owner seeing the new flagship blooming before my eyes with these big upgrades. I was really feeling the hurt with SoundTower and not being able to edit much of anything except midi manipulation of presets basically. This is huge for me. John