# Opcode Studio Vision



## dcoscina (Jun 11, 2017)

Hey All. I have to believe more than a few of you older guys (I'm also in this age category but wasn't on Mac when this program was around) used this sequencer/DAW. I've interviewed a few Hollywood composers and I find it amazing that guys like Yared and Isham both lauded Vision during my chat with them. I also read that JN Howard and Michael Giacchino were avid users. What was it about this software that made it so good for film scoring in particular? 

Some composers moved to Logic from Vision when Opcode was bought by Peavy and the program was left to rot rather than being developed. Others turned to DP which looks on the surface like a reasonable competitor. 

Just curious. I was still using PCs at that (Windows 3.1 running Passport Mastertracks Pro and Encore) since Mac Pluses were waaaaaaayyyy too expensive for moi.


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## synthpunk (Jun 11, 2017)

Yep, we had Vision on a Macintosh at our complex in NYC. Loved it. That computer wherever it is (perhaps in someone's attic?) should be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for the amount of hits made on it.


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## chillbot (Jun 11, 2017)

douggibson said:


> I'm 40


I'm also 40. I don't think it's that old. This was the greatest DAW program ever, period, as far as I'm concerned. It's also the last time I used a mac and may still use a mac if they had kept it going. I used studio vision on a mac but I'm a PC guy and we just had regular vision, no audio capabilities only midi for PC. I've used cakewalk my whole life on PC (still do) but back then I liked vision so much I would do all the midi in vision and then bounce it down and bring it into cakewalk/sonar/whatever to do audio.

This doesn't seem like that long ago to me, maybe 17-18 years? But I think the best thing that ever happened to logic was the end of studio vision, because it was just becoming a big deal at the time. I remember dozens of guys I knew all switching to logic and that was back when logic was close to a grand to purchase...


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## chillbot (Jun 11, 2017)

dcoscina said:


> What was it about this software that made it so good for film scoring in particular?


I think what it was for me was just a killer GUI and really intuitive/easy controls. Like it didn't do that much, but it did everything you wanted it to. I find it very similar to Sonar now, which is what I use.


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## jonathanparham (Jun 11, 2017)

First program I used before Pro Tools. I don't think I used a manual for it. Hooked it up to my Ensoniq VFX (no drive). I went from Vision to Logic version 3 and was very frustrated.


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## artomatic (Jun 11, 2017)

Yup. My first DAW. Loved Studio Vision (I thought Gibson bought them out...). I wish Opcode was still around. Jumped on the MOTU bandwagon then to Digidesign when it debuted in the early 90s. I wish PT's MIDI implementation could be half as good as Vision!


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## fastlanephil (Jun 11, 2017)

I'm really old. I started with Opcode's Sequencer and upgraded to Vision. Vision was a huge break through for working with MIDI. It wasn't just an evolution it was a revolution. Vision had no samples and I doubt if studio Vision Pro had any either. All sounds were from synthesizers or sound modules at that time.

Vision like MOTU's Performer was MIDI only. Vision Studio Pro was MiDI and Audio recording with the advent of computer DSP. Actually I never upgraded to Studio Vision Pro because Opcode's install copy protection scheme trashed my hard drive and I lost business files. I was pretty pissed. I switched to the multi-track cassett players that were gaining popularity. It all ended up on tape anyway then.

Someone gave me a busted copy of Opcode's Easy Vision that was pretty cool. It was super easy to use but I was working with tape.

By the time I decided to return to computer audio recording Opcode was gone. It was actually Gibson Guitar that bought Opcode in 1998 and shut it down one year later. There was talk of SVP being ported to Windows as Apple was really struggling at the time. It was a dark day when that happened. Musicians were boycotting Gibson over it. I know musicians were using it for quite a while after that until OMS was incompatible with the USB audio i/o and OSX on newer Macs.

As I remember Vision was more geared towards working with rock and pop music and Performer was more geared towards classical music structure. So I assume it was Digital Performer who's strength was working with film(celluloid back then of course) just as it is now.

Here's two demos of the last version of Studio Vision Pro.





I have an iMac G5 that needs a new mother board, which I bought years ago and never got around to swapping out. Maybe it's time to attempt it. I also have Studio Vision Pro with no CP on a drive some where that I downloaded off the internet. So I would probably able to at least run it in OS9 but the iMac is USB so I wouldn't be able to send or receive midi data. Not sure what I could do with audio. You would need a pre USB Mac port which would be a serial port for OMS(Opcode MIDI System) to work.


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## dcoscina (Jun 11, 2017)

artomatic said:


> Yup. My first DAW. Loved Studio Vision (I thought Gibson bought them out...). I wish Opcode was still around. Jumped on the MOTU bandwagon then to Digidesign when it debuted in the early 90s. I wish PT's MIDI implementation could be half as good as Vision!


Yes it was a Gibson and not Peavy


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## NYC Composer (Jun 11, 2017)

Vision was the bomb. Before that I used hardware sequencers like Oberheim's DSX, then Doctor T on my Commodore SX-64 (portable-only 25 lbs!), then Southworth's something or other (Jam Factory?) on the Mac Plus which crashed every ten minutes. 

Vision was the first really professional sequencer I ever used. It was dead simple to operate and rarely crashed. I did hundreds of projects with it and was completely heartbroken when Gibson/Norlin bought them and then closed them.

I never did try StudioVision, the first MIDI/audio hybrid I knew about. By that time, the studio I worked at had ProTools 3, and we ran Vision on one computer and ProTools 3 on another. We locked the whole thing up to 24 track tape and 3/4 inch video with a combination of MIDI and SMPTE timecode. It was a Frankenstein monster, but it worked. The remote from the video machine actually controlled the whole mess, start, stop, FF, rewind, and everything synced. You younger guys have no idea how lucky you are to have Quicktime or whatever format digital video, and disk-based audio-those were total game changers.

Anyone, Vision was my entry to professional MIDI recording, and I will always look back fondly.


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## charlieclouser (Jun 11, 2017)

I used Vision and StudioVision from the day they were introduced, and I was a beta tester for both. By the time they came on the scene, I had already been through:

- Commodore-64 with Sequential Circuits cartridge-based sequencer.

- IBM PC-XT with Roland MPU-401 MIDI interface and Roger Powell's Texture 2.5, and later Octave-Plateau's Sequencer Plus.

- Atari 1040st with Steinberg Pro-24, Emagic Creator, and Hybrid Arts SMPTE Track.

- Mac Plus with Performer v1.22, then Passport's Master Tracks Pro, and later Southworth Total Music, MIDI Paint, and One Step with the troublesome JamBox4 MIDI+SMPTE interface.

When Vision and StudioVision came on the scene, it was a revelation. Opcode basically invented MTC (MIDI Time Code) and before Opcode's Timecode Machine came out, syncing up to tape via SMPTE (as opposed to beat-based "drum machine" sync boxes like JL Cooper's PPS-1 etc.) was troublesome to say the least, requiring proprietary sync boxes like the dreaded JamBox4, expensive boxes like the Roland SBX-80 (which required that you program your tempo map into IT and then it would drive other sequencers via Beat Clock - not ideal), various opaque and expensive boxes from Garfield Electronics like the Master Beat, Doctor Click, and Mini-Doc, the Atari-only Hybrid Arts box, etc. When the Timecode Machine came on the scene we could finally work with the sequencer slaved to the VCR in a reliable manner, so that was a big deal.

StudioVision introduced digital audio recording INSIDE the MIDI sequencing environment, which at the time was beyond belief, and ushered in the age of the modern DAW as we now know it - but at the time it was the only game in town for a few years. It used the first version of Pro Tools hardware from Digidesign (now Avid), and although there was no such thing as plugins in those days, simply having 16 tracks of hard-drive audio recording inside the MIDI sequencer was amazing. (This is the setup we used for NIN albums like The Downward Spiral and The Fragile as well as albums by Marilyn Manson, Rob Zombie, etc.)

But what made Vision/StudioVision so cool? Here's some key features, many of which were ripped off and are now an expected part of any decent DAW, and some of which have never been seen again - much to my dismay:

- Twenty-six separate "sub sequences" within each project file. Similar to "Chunks" in Performer, each sub-sequence was essentially a complete song, with its own set of tracks, its own tempo / meter track, its own SMPTE start point, etc. This basically meant that a whole film score or tv episode could be one project file, with each cue (up to 26 of them) contained within the sub-sequences. Very cool. These sub-sequences could be triggered by MIDI or by typing a single letter on the Mac keyboard (for instantly firing whole songs in a live setting), and could be used like the patterns in a drum machine to assemble a song from shorter parts. Sub-sequences could loop indefinitely until another one was started, so you could use them to "vamp" a section live until you wanted to go to the next section. You could also record a performance made up of live-triggered sub-sequences (like capturing clips into an arrangement in Ableton), or manually assemble sub-sequences INSIDE another sub-sequence; in this case the sub-sequences could inherit the tempo of the sequence they were inside - or NOT, running at their own tempo inside a master sequence that was running at a different tempo. Freaking amazing and still better than anything that's come since - except perhaps Performer's "chunks" function, which is quite full-featured and based on many of the same ideas.

- Vision/StudioVision introduced the idea of "drawing" controller events in a "strip chart" at the bottom of the piano roll editor. Their version of this was better than most that exist today, with exponential curves, quantized-random, and many other features that are still missing from most DAWs. They invented the concept and did it better than any of the copies that came later.

- Their version of the now-common piano-roll editor was the definitive version. Various permutations of the concept existed prior to Vision, but some were very strange (Emagic Notator for example) and didn't really make sense at a glance - but Vision's DID. Octave-Plateau's version was closest in appearance, and came before Vision, but as it was a DOS program in the days before PCs had a mouse (imagine that!) it wasn't nearly as usable for editing. Passport's Master Tracks Pro had a similar editor on Mac, and might have been before Vision, but when Vision hit the scene with full mouse support for editing notes in the piano roll and controllers in the strip chart, it was game over. Today, all DAWs copy Opcode's version of the piano-roll editor.

- In the "Arrange" or "Overview" of a sequence, you could see the contents of regions, much like most DAWs do now - but Vision had a function that's never been seen again: Contextual Regions. It's easy to understand if you're looking at it, but hard to explain - but I'll try. Let's say you had a bunch of notes, then a little gap of about two bars, then another bunch of notes. In the videos in the post above, you can see in the top-middle of the edit window the button for "Phrases" or "Blocks", and when in "Phrases" mode there's a parameter for "Silence". This parameter was like a "threshold" and above this threshold, both groups of notes AND the gap between them would appear as a single "region" in the Arrange window - but BELOW this threshold, you would see two regions separated by that two-bar gap. This meant you could decide on the fly how regions would be defined for editing. This was freaking amazing, allowing you to determine on the fly how much data would be selected when clicking and dragging. The only drag was that I don't think there was a way to fix the region definitions in the manner that we are now used to - the "region-ification" of groups of MIDI events was solely determined by that "Silence" parameter in "Phrases" mode. It was sort of like an always-on "strip silence" parameter for MIDI events in a track. Still, very cool.

- Integration with Galaxy (and Galaxy Plus Editors). Galaxy was Opcode's patch librarian software, and the Plus Editors version had on-screen visual editors for the patches within your hardware synths. The Galaxy editors introduced many ways of visualizing synth parameters that we now take for granted, like the visual display of an ADSR envelope with draggable handles instead of just four sliders, draggable curves for key-scaling, etc. - and it cannot be overstated how revolutionary this was at the time. But what Vision could do was import the names of the patches that were inside a synth (if that synth had been "synced" with Galaxy) - this meant that in the days before virtual instruments, you didn't need to send a program change of 42 to your synth and hope that it called up "Phat Bass" or whatever - you could see the actual names of the patches on-screen inside your MIDI sequencer. Revolutionary!

We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Dave Oppenheim, Ray Spears, David Zicarelli, Tony Widoff, and Doug Wyatt for their innovations. They are the ones that brought us:

- MIDI Time Code
- MIDI Machine Control
- Standard MIDI Files
- Integrated audio/MIDI sequencing (aka the modern DAW)
- Graphic editing of ADSR envelopes
- Graphic editing of MIDI continuous controllers in a strip chart
- Mouse-based editing of notes in a piano roll editor

And so much more. What a time to be alive it was.

Zicarelli, along with Joel Chadabe and Tony Widoff, had another company called Intelligent Music, which had some pretty amazing programs as well - M, Jam Factory, and, later, Max - many of the concepts that originated there became products from Cycling74, mainly Max - which became integrated into Ableton Live and still very much in use today.


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## chillbot (Jun 11, 2017)

charlieclouser said:


> What a time to be alive it was.


Fantastic. Thanks for this post. I loved vision so much yet had no idea.


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## JJP (Jun 11, 2017)

Charlie summed it up. Nothing looked or felt like Vision. It was solid. It did what it was supposed to do. The interface made sense so you didn't have to keep consulting the manual. It communicated well with other machines. Then they added audio in the same program!

Galaxy was great too, and it integrated well with Vision. I still have yet to find a patch librarian that works as well.

Many of us silently cried and cursed Gibson when Opcode died. Even the current Mac MIDI Setup application owes a sizeable debt to Opcode's Open MIDI System -- OMS.

This thread also makes me long for the days when programs had to be bloat-free and interfaces were clean and without frills because system resouces were so valuable.


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## charlieclouser (Jun 11, 2017)

JJP said:


> Many of us silently cried and cursed Gibson when Opcode died. Even the current Mac MIDI Setup application owes a sizeable debt to Opcode's Open MIDI System -- OMS.



Yup. Doug Wyatt, one of the original Opcode team, is now an Apple employee and was instrumental in the development of Core MIDI which is indeed based on ideas pioneered in Opcode's OMS. In fact, when I watched the live streams from WWDC a few years ago I was pleasantly surprised to see that the presentation about Audio Units v3 was being delivered by Doug himself.

And, yes, we all died a little inside when Gibson bought Opcode and the whole thing just withered and died. That was when I switched to Logic, where I've been ever since.


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## KerrySmith (Jun 11, 2017)

Ah. Vision/Studio Vision changed everything for me. During the day I battled with Synclavier and tape, but after work I could go home write and edit songs with far greater ease using Studio Vision. I switched to DP for a little while after SVP faded away, but I could never really get into it.


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## NYC Composer (Jun 11, 2017)

Again, can't comment on StudioVision (and don't need to as Charlie did it so elegantly) but there were three incredibly important words about Vision that made all the difference in my world of tight deadlines and multiple projects:

It. Just. Worked.


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## KerrySmith (Jun 11, 2017)

It felt like the original Opcode and Digidesign guys came from the same "place" and their early designs were really easy to understand, powerful to use, and integrated well with one another.


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## charlieclouser (Jun 12, 2017)

KerrySmith said:


> It felt like the original Opcode and Digidesign guys came from the same "place" and their early designs were really easy to understand, powerful to use, and integrated well with one another.



If I'm not mistaken, Opcode and DigiDesign were in the same technology office park, or across the parking lot from each other, or something like that. The movers and shakers in those days seemed to be a pretty small crowd.


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## jonnybutter (Jun 12, 2017)

I used Vision and Studio Vision too, for several years. I was able to sync to picture with LTC via video tape, and it worked well (albeit slowly). I couldn't afford a video deck with VITC, so I had to have pre roll so things would sync up.

Vision was great because, kind of like the original Final Cut, it was so intuitive you barely needed any training to use it. And it, along with Mac OS pre-X, was very responsive. We are used to a small delay on more complex OSes, i.e. UNIX based, but the old Mac OSes were INSTANT. 

Nothing ever replaced Studio Vision. Certainly not Logic, pre or post Apple. Logic can do a lot more stuff, but I wouldn't call it 'elegant' or clean or simple...


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## NYC Composer (Jun 12, 2017)

Around '97, knowing it was over, I gravitated from Vision to the first version of Cubase VST for two reasons:

1. It seemed fairly simple for a MIDI/audio hybrid.

2. The early VST instruments and effects, crappy though they were, blew my mind. The concept, oh my! ...and now, here we are, in a disk streaming world.

I waited WAY too long to sell my huge Roland sampler setup (sigh). I donated my last S-760s to a school.


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## dcoscina (Jun 12, 2017)

Great responses! I knew there was a lot of good stuff in Vision. I guess I didn't hear about it until it was already finished on both platforms, otherwise I would have bought it for PC....


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## dcoscina (Jun 12, 2017)

NYC Composer said:


> Around '97, knowing it was over, I gravitated from Vision to the first version of Cubase VST for two reasons:
> 
> 1. It seemed fairly simple for a MIDI/audio hybrid.
> 
> ...


I tried Cubase VST when I had a PC built after my Compaq no longer worked. It was a hot mess. Didn't work well at all, crashed all the time. I think I stayed on Mastertracks until 2002 when I moved to Sonar, and used that until 2005 when I switched to Mac and haven't looked back since then, mostly using DP but a little more Cubase these days. 

A lot of younger guys look at DP and say it looks "old fashioned" but to me it makes all the sense in the world. Being able to grab a part of a section and move it around is still faster than cutting-pasting in Cubase or Logic. I think PT8 started using that as well.


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## zvenx (Jun 12, 2017)

It too was my first DAW and I used it for maybe 3 years even after Gibson pulled the plug, then eventually moved on.
Charlie has of course mentioned most of the great features, in more details and better composed than I would have.
The one feature that I still haven't found, at least in Cubendo, is wait for note.

With wait for note the metronome would play, but the DAW would be on pause and only start recording when you hit the first note. This was a feature I used all the time.
rsp


charlieclouser said:


> I used Vision and StudioVision from the day they were introduced, and I was a beta tester for both. By the time they came on the scene, I had already been through:
> 
> - Commodore-64 with Sequential Circuits cartridge-based sequencer.
> 
> ...


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## zvenx (Jun 12, 2017)

JJP said:


> ........
> Many of us silently cried and cursed Gibson when Opcode died. .....



Not all of us did it silently 
To this day I refuse to buy any Gibson product and I sure love the sound of a Les Paul. Went with PRS Guitar instead (and yes I know they dont' sound at all alike  )
rsp


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## dcoscina (Jun 12, 2017)

Too bad no one thought to buy the code and bring it up to the 21st century with the ability to host VIs and such. I'd totally jump on it though I'm also old school and don't think the younger crowd of Ableton kids would like its GUI. Pretty stupid of Gibson to abandon a potential money maker back then....


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## mverta (Jun 12, 2017)

Vision and Studio Vision were my workhorses for years. Went to Pro Tools 8. 

Still on Pro Tools 8.


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## dcoscina (Jun 12, 2017)

mverta said:


> Vision and Studio Vision were my workhorses for years. Went to Pro Tools 8.
> 
> Still on Pro Tools 8.


What was it about PT8 that drew you to that program for composing as opposed to the big 3 (Cubase, Logic or DP). I worked on PT8 for a while myself but found I needed VE PRO to handle VIs...mind you, its the same with DP7 through to 9.....


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## mverta (Jun 12, 2017)

dcoscina said:


> What was it about PT8 that drew you to that program for composing as opposed to the big 3 (Cubase, Logic or DP). I worked on PT8 for a while myself but found I needed VE PRO to handle VIs...mind you, its the same with DP7 through to 9.....


 
I was doing a lot of sound design and 5.1 mixing and it was and still is the industry standard. Plus, I don't use the MIDI editing features - I perform my parts. So everything I need is in there and it's rock solid. I host VE Pro inside of Pro Tools, and run VI's on newer slave PC's.


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## synthpunk (Jun 12, 2017)

Anyone else remember the disaster that was the Southworth Jambox midi/sempte interface? Sync to tape worked like shit. We had to spend a lot more money to get a system (Linndrum, MPC, Oberheim, Fairlight, etc.) that talked to each other and tape reliably.


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## ckiraly (Jun 12, 2017)

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. My first setup: PowerMac 7500 & Opcode SVP 3. Amazing how much I got done with that rig.


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## wst3 (Jun 12, 2017)

I remember Studio Vision, I remember specifically when I saw it at an AES show shortly after (maybe even just before?) it was announced. The integration of audio and MIDI was a real eye opener. That it was built on one of the best MIDI sequencers was a bonus.

I traveled a slightly different path, started with that SCI cartridge in an SX-64 (no kidding), and then used just about every C-64 sequencer (I can't even remember their names) and then moved up (over) to the Amiga, and Dr. Ts, Texture, "M", Logic, and especially Bars & Pipes Pro, which could support audio if you purchased the Sunrize audio card, which I did<G>!

When the Amiga went away I switched to a PC and Windows 3.1, and for a variety of reasons, Cakewalk Pro Audio (might have even been just slightly before Cakewalk added audio.)

Way back when I entertained adding a Mac to the studio just for Studio Vision. There was an elegance and simplicity to the interface that made working with it so easy. I'd probably work with in 3 or 4 times a year, and yet there was never any fumbling. It was that well thought out... or they just thought like me?

These days I still don't have a Mac in the studio, and I still think about it. I'm really perfectly happy with Sonar and Studio One, but there are things that DP does that I can't do as easily (and I think DP is the successor, more-or-less, to Vision). And I'd dearly love to have "M" back, but then I still want Texture as well.

There were things you could do with MIDI only sequencers that you just can't do with Audio & MIDI sequencers. Part of it is mind set, you could vary the tempo, for example, and there were no artifacts. You could make some wicked edits that you'd have to be much more careful with if audio was involved. Texture's concept of non-linear sequencing would be tough to do with audio. And forget about algorithmic composition with audio - we'll get there I'm sure, but we aren't there now.

Sometimes I actually miss MIDI only... then I get a project, and I don't have to clean and align the tape deck, and I don't have to fuss with MTC, and I'm ok with what we have now!


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## KerrySmith (Jun 12, 2017)

charlieclouser said:


> If I'm not mistaken, Opcode and DigiDesign were in the same technology office park, or across the parking lot from each other, or something like that. The movers and shakers in those days seemed to be a pretty small crowd.



I thought that as well, but wasn't 100% sure. It would make sense. There's definitely a benefit to being in a physical creative/dev ecosystem. Those guys probably didn't even consider themselves real competitors back then.


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## TGV (Jun 12, 2017)

I was in the same boat. I had a mac, a keyboard, a sampler and a GM module, and EZ Vision, as the "lite" version was called, and it was great. What a fantastic set of features. I later upgraded to Vision, being scammed by that !*@&# music shop (they "forgot" to officially register my copy and then went bankrupt). A little while later, none of that mattered, and I had to move over to Logic, and it was a disappointment. Just one sequence, what a misery. No patch editor (I had a version with OpCode's fantastic MIDI editor, Galaxy), and those piano lanes and MIDI draw and all that ... well, you win some, you lose some, they say, although in software there's no real need for that.


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## samphony (Jun 12, 2017)

charlieclouser said:


> In the videos in the post above, you can see in the top-middle of the edit window the button for "Phrases" or "Blocks", and when in "Phrases" mode there's a parameter for "Silence". This parameter was like a "threshold" and above this threshold, both groups of notes AND the gap between them would appear as a single "region" in the Arrange window - but BELOW this threshold, you would see two regions separated by that two-bar gap.


If I'm not mistaken, DP is working in the phrases manner you describe here.


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## synthpunk (Jun 12, 2017)

I remember the days when I could call Dr. Amon Tobinfield at Dr T's evry day and discuss the crazy world of KCS with the man writing it


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jun 12, 2017)

About the piano roll, I believe that was MasterTracks Pro's innovation. But until the final versions it didn't allow discontiguous selection, and Vision did. That was a huge thing.

I used MTP, but there was a unique tempo function I used in Vision... and I forget what it was now.


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## charlieclouser (Jun 12, 2017)

samphony said:


> If I'm not mistaken, DP is working in the phrases manner you describe here.




Ohh, really? That was a great feature, and I'm glad to see it's lived on in Performer. I was deep into Performer back in the v1.22 days, but we're talking Mac Plus era - when Performer only had list editing of MIDI events! 

I know it's a deep and well-loved DAW these days, and has so many killer features for scoring... but I am so locked into Logic with my EXS24 library and decades of song files I need to be able to access, so I can't switch at this point. 

Bummer.

But I do miss sub-sequences/chunks, all the cool tempo/timecode calculation features, and other bad ass features of Performer for sure.


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## charlieclouser (Jun 12, 2017)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> About the piano roll, I believe that was MasterTracks Pro's innovation. But until the final versions it didn't allow discontiguous selection, and Vision did. That was a huge thing.
> 
> I used MTP, but there was a unique tempo function I used in Vision... and I forget what it was now.



Yeah, you're right - I remember now. MTP was visually so crisp and clear and awesome, seemed visually kind of similar to Sequencer Plus in some ways, but it sort of got eclipsed pretty quickly when Vision came out. It's still available, believe it or not, but only for Windows these days.


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## charlieclouser (Jun 12, 2017)

synthpunk said:


> I remember the days when I could call Dr. Amon Tobinfield at Dr T's evry day and discuss the crazy world of KCS with the man writing it



Man, Dr. T's KCS was MENTAL. I tried, and failed, to get into it for my own stuff. But I did have to get it up and running in order to be able to demo it on the sales floor at Sam Ash in the late 1980's - and I do remember it could do some absolutely crazy stuff. Wild.


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## synthpunk (Jun 12, 2017)

Algorithmic composer, etc all that, yah. Those were the days when you could take over an hour to program a program change in the exact right place  It did inspire M, Realtime. And Joel Chadabe though which I miss till this day.



charlieclouser said:


> Man, Dr. T's KCS was MENTAL. I tried, and failed, to get into it for my own stuff. But I did have to get it up and running in order to be able to demo it on the sales floor at Sam Ash in the late 1980's - and I do remember it could do some absolutely crazy stuff. Wild.


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## synthnut1 (Jun 12, 2017)

Vision !!....WOW !!....Blast from the past with my little Mac Plus , with a FULL 2 GB of ram !!.....I was the cat's A_ _ !!....So simple and worked like a charm .... Midi spec was all over the map depending on what company you dealt with ..... Went from there to Performer , and then Digital Performer with a full blown setup with 3 - MTP's, with modules in STEREO !! ...... Motu's support got really bad, so I switched to a PC and now use Cubase .... Life was so much easier back then .....You could make music without constant technological issues ..... I might still have some of my old software ....Vision maybe ????.....LOL !!....Jim


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## NYC Composer (Jun 12, 2017)

dcoscina said:


> I tried Cubase VST when I had a PC built after my Compaq no longer worked. It was a hot mess. Didn't work well at all, crashed all the time. I think I stayed on Mastertracks until 2002 when I moved to Sonar, and used that until 2005 when I switched to Mac and haven't looked back since then, mostly using DP but a little more Cubase these days.
> 
> A lot of younger guys look at DP and say it looks "old fashioned" but to me it makes all the sense in the world. Being able to grab a part of a section and move it around is still faster than cutting-pasting in Cubase or Logic. I think PT8 started using that as well.


It worked on my Mac (not that I can remember which Mac in '97), otherwise I probably would have dumped it and moved on to DP. The VST instruments and effects were pretty awful, but for a change, I could see the future.

The worst sequencer experience I ever had was with Southworth sequencing software/Jambox. The potential was there, but I've never had software that crashed as often or as hard, requiring a restart every time. Miserable. Dr. T's sequencer on the Commodore couldn't do much but was much more stable. I also loved Dr. T's "spin the dial" patch creator for the DX-7, since I never could figure out how to program that beast.


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## TGV (Jun 13, 2017)

synthnut1 said:


> Blast from the past with my little Mac Plus , with a FULL 2 GB of ram !!


That's really a lot for a Mac Plus. It couldn't even address it. I think you meant 2MB.


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## jonnybutter (Jun 13, 2017)

TGV said:


> That's really a lot for a Mac Plus. It couldn't even address it. I think you meant 2MB.



Yes indeed. Also, Vision (w/out audio) ran on the Mac llci.


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