On Jul 25, 2006, at 9:33 AM, Dave Robillard <drobilla(a)connect.carleton.ca> wrote: "Common things should be easy, and unusual things should be possible". The common things in MIDI are plug-and-play. Only the "unusual things" are "all about learning". NoteOn and NoteOff, sustain pedal, volume control, stereo pan, pitch-bend, mod-wheel ... these are all plug-and-play, and have been since the earliest days of MIDI. Manufacturers who make controllers know to send out these commands in a stylized way, and sound designers who write patches for synths (soft and hard) know to make their synths respond in an appropriate way to these controllers. And for a lot musicians, this is enough for them to do what they want to do. This is the MIDI world Garageband lives in, for example, and the biggest problem Apple has with Garageband is that it is an entry-level program that makes most of its users so happy that they aren't interested in upgrading to semi-pro software. --- John Lazzaro http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~lazzaro lazzaro [at] cs [dot] berkeley [dot] edu ---