While some sport such goodies as algorithmic aids to composition, sequencers are most commonly thought of - and used as - digital emulations of a multitrack tape deck. In 1992, the Mac offers MIDI sequencers, digital audio systems, and powerful amalgams of the two.Ī sequencer is the application most people think of when you say 'MIDI software'. Whether you're talking MIDI, digital audio, or the two in tandem, the Macintosh today can be configured into one serious music-making machine.

Clicking-and-dragging, cutting-and-pasting, global controller changes and hand-drawn sound waveforms are as familiar today as they were esoteric seven years ago. Indeed, the conventions of the Mac's user interface have reshaped many facets of the composing and production process itself, introducing us to new ways of visualising and modifying music: notes seen as horizontal bars on a scrolling 'piano roll' grid, to which they are 'quantised' an 'event list' that shows music as numbers instead of notation. The machine's hi-resolution screen and graphical user interface showed immediate potential for aping and automating the traditional work patterns of the eye-hand-coordinated it seemed naturally to grant access to things graphic as well as musical. The Holy Grail of computer based music: MIDI and digital audio combined in Opcode's Studio Vision.įrom the first, the Apple Macintosh had a fascination for the creative individual.

Music production software for mac