.MusicMachines.net Main FAQ

What is the Blue Ribbon Soundworks?
What's MIDI?
What makes these programs so cool?
Why aren't these programs for sale?
Why are these programs available here?
So, you're not charging for this stuff?
What about the music itself? Do I need to worry about licensing fees or copyright?
What do I need to run these programs?
Who are these programs for?
What are the primary differences between these programs?
Hey! I broke my computer!
Can you recommend a good sound card?

What is the Blue Ribbon Soundworks?

The Blue Ribbon Soundworks Ltd., hereafter referred to as BRS, was one of the premiere innovators in MIDI software. Founded in 1988, and based in Atlanta, GA, they created programs for Silicon Graphics and Commodore Amiga computers as well as for Windows. Among their highest-profile creations was the multimedia presentation system and musical score used by the City of Atlanta in its successful bid for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games.

In 1995, BRS's AudioActive technology (the music engine behind SuperJAM! v2.0) won BYTE's Best of Comdex Multimedia Award. Not long afterward, Microsoft purchased BRS, and set our heroes to work on what would become DirectMusic.

Wait just a sec -- what's MIDI?

General MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) is a hardware and software standard by which MIDI-compatible programs, sound cards, and instruments can communicate. There are several different versions, some advocated by specific manufacturers (e.g., Yamaha's XG system) to make their equipment more desirable. All of them involve the same process, however: a device decodes a MIDI file, which is a set of instructions for a musical instrument. The instrument, following those instructions, plays music. Think of a MIDI file as the music roll of a player piano, only infinitely more flexible

The advantages MIDI has over any other electronic music format are considerable:

• The file size is ludicrously small -- a full movement of a symphony can weigh in at less than 100 kb, and the average pop song arrangement is around 40 kb -- compared with an MP3 file, which averages around 1 MB per minute of song (at 128 kbps), or with a .WAV file (up to ten times as big as the MP3). You can fit ten to twenty audio tracks on a CD-R, and maybe one to four hundred MP3 files, depending upon the compression... but you can fit around fourteen thousand average-sized MIDI files.

• The file can be fully edited, including but not limited to notes, instrumentation, volume, tempo, pitch, and special effects based on the MIDI instrument.

• Almost every MIDI file is General MIDI 1.0 compatible, and so can be played on pretty much any computer or MIDI instrument in the world. Many of the newer standards, e.g. Yamaha's XG, add instruments and enhancements, but files made to those standards will still play on a General MIDI rig... just without some of the bells and whistles (perhaps literally).

The disadvantages may seem daunting, but really aren't:

• The sound quality is mightily dependent upon hardware. These days, sound cards tend to be pretty darn good, so as long as you've got a name brand made in the past few years, e.g. SoundBlaster or Monster Sound, you're probably all right. External synthesizers also usually sound great (although I'm not thrilled with consumer-level Casio keyboards, which I suppose are really keen if you want to do tinny techno all night long. Of course, if if that is precisely what you want to do, go for it -- goodness knows, people are making money at it).

• Sending MIDI files to someone else may be disappointing for them -- you usually have no way of knowing what someone else's hardware will sound like. Again, however, most people have decent sound cards these days, so it's not anywhere near as much of a problem as it was, say, five years ago.

• Audio CDs and MP3s have complete (although sometimes compressed) copies of the original songs on them. Even the most faithful MIDI is only an approximation of the original arrangement of the song, and there are no vocals, unless you sing along. (Did someone say karaoke?)

• There is no portable MIDI-CD player, and it's not likely that there ever will be one. The closest you'll get will be a laptop with a decent sound system, and that's tough enough to get, even these days.

What makes these programs so cool?

Most MIDI programs assume you are at leased somewhat skilled musically, and know where to put the notes on a staff (or "piano roll"). The other MIDI jamming programs available have some interesting features, and some even sound pretty good. But a few things about the BRS programs stand out:

• The AudioActive engine (and the later Interactive Music Architecture [IMA]) allows you to literally create a new musical work with only a few mouse clicks. Don't like it? One more click, and it changes completely.

• The music just seems to sound better. The drum breaks and fills in SJam sound more natural, the bass is more supportive, the piano richer, the guitar stronger, the incidental instruments more cunningly placed.

• Other programs say they have "hundreds" of musical styles -- but they count each groove (intensity level), break, fill, intro and stop as a musical style, so that, for instance, when they say they have 200 styles, what they mean is twenty-five different types of music -- Reggae, Blues, etc. -- with eight variations each. AudioActive styles, on the other hand, are complete -- your Reggae or Blues style already includes those levels of variations. When fully installed, SuperJAM! has over 140 styles, which, when counted in the manner of those other programs, comes out to over 1,120 "styles".

• Each of those variations can have up to sixteen internal variations for each of six instruments. Between the instruments, the internal variations, the intensity levels, and the number of styles, any given measure of music can have almost nineteen billion possible combinations out of the box.

• The variations can be turned on or off, rearranged, combined, and otherwise twisted around at will -- for instance, it takes only a few extra mouse clicks to create a piece of music using a drum pattern from Rock Ballad, a bass pattern from Midnight Train, the keyboard riffs from New Age II, and the strings from Rachmaninoff....

• If you get tired of the styles you have, SuperJAM!'s included Style Editor allows you to create your own, from scratch.

• Here, on this site, these programs are available for free!

Why aren't these programs for sale?

They're not for sale because Microsoft took them off the market. Some programs included the AudioActive engine or the earliest versions of IMA; Music Producer was released commercially as part of the Microsoft InterDev suite, and at least one children's program had SJam tech in it as well -- but SJam, Melody Maestro, and the rest had been published by BRS, and after MS bought the company those products were never rereleased. Nowadays, the newest evolution of the engine is an integral part of DirectMusic, which is part of the DirectX API, which you need for pretty much everything.

Why are these programs available here?

I was a rabid Bars & Pipes/SJam user -- my third album was arranged on my Amiga with those programs -- and I'd seen the specs for SJam v2, which was for Windows only. I promised myself I would (shudder) get a Windows computer if I could get my hands on (what I naively thought at the time was) the only program I wanted for it.

After randomly looking around for it for awhile, back in, oh, mid-1997 or so I got your basic brilliant idea. I would call Microsoft, and see if they had any copies of the darn thing lying around. I was willing to pay up to $150, more if they had Style disks.

My second phone call got me to an extraordinarly helpful tech support person named Kelly. (Everyone I have ever dealt with at Microsoft has been polite, helpful, and competent. This is no small thing.) Kelly said he'd get back to me, and about a week later he did. He'd spoken to one of the old BRS guys, who happened to have a shrink-wrapped release copy of SJam v2 lying around, and, since it was too much trouble and expense to recycle the floppy disks, was it all right to just send it to me, gratis?

Even as I profusely thanked Kelly for his grace and coolness (while cavorting around the room doing the Happy Happy Joy Joy Dance), the thought struck me that this superb product would never be sold again. And that just didn't seem right.

So, I put it up on my web site. And that started things really rolling.

So, you're not charging for this stuff?

Not a dime. And, if Microsoft ever decides to sell these programs again, I'll have them down from this site that day. Money has absolutely nothing to do with this. Access to great and useful music software has everything to do with it. The programs are not for sale at the moment, you can't get them in any store, and I believe they are way, way too cool to let them vanish into obscurity.

To my surprise and delight, Todor Fay, one of the primary people behind BRS and the main designer of Bars & Pipes and SJam, has endorsed this site, and told me "not to worry about the software" when I asked him point-blank if he wanted me to take it down. So, remember, gang. We have to use this great boon for the good of humanity.

What about the music itself? Do I need to worry about licensing fees or copyright?

Short answer: No problem. One of the original selling points of many AudioActive products was that creators of multimedia presentations -- amateur filmmakers, seminar instructors, lecturers, and the like -- often had to pay prohibitive license fees to use existing copyrighted music. But, with programs such as SJam and Music Producer, users could whip up something original and noncopyrighted very quickly, and to their specifications to boot.

To be more specific, BRS directly stated that all music created with their products is the user's to distribute without additional royalties or license fees. What we create with these programs is all ours.

What do I need to run these programs?

Just about any Windows-based computer made since 1995 should handle SJam, Melody Maestro, or Music Producer. They were designed to work on minimal systems and older processors, and the silicon monsters of today often have more memory in their graphics cards than these programs are capable of using, period. There are two known issues:

• Older Cyrix and AMD chipsets sometimes cannot run the programs. The problem seems to be in their handling (or not) of floating-point operations. Later AMD chips apparently have the problem licked.

• The programs sometimes don't want to run, or even install, under newer versions of Windows (Windows 2000, Windows ME, and Windows XP). The problem on WinME seems to be WinME's elimination of "Real DOS" mode, which allowed earlier versions of Windows to run DOS programs. I'm not sure what the problem is with Win2K or WinXP. The problems on all those systems are inconsistent -- I can't find a common thread to follow to debug anything. Uninstalling, rebooting, and reinstalling will often succeed. I can promise you that my brand new Music Machine, my homebrew computer running a clean install of WinXP, runs Music Producer and SJam just fine.

DirectMusic Producer is a different beast, much more demanding. The full requirements are on the DirectMusic FAQ page.

Who are these programs for?

• Composers who want an Instant Idea Generator.

• Filmmakers or multimedia presentation creators who want a quick instrumental music track.

• Musicians, composers, and arrangers who want to get an idea of what instruments they might want for a band, or for a specific song.

• Songwriters who have a song in their heads, but don't know how to arrange a drum track, a bass line, or a piano riff.

• Musicians and singers who want to practice, but the rest of the band is out of town and the karaoke version of the song you wrote yesterday just hasn't hit the shelves yet. ;-)

• Musicians and singers who need to cut the demo now.

• Teachers who want to show musical structure to kids.

• Non-musicians who would like to learn about music.

• Non-musicians who don't care about learning music, but who need some -- for a greeting card, answering machine message, practical joke, background for a marriage proposal, whatever.

• Anyone who wants to have fun with music!

What are the primary differences between these programs?

Each program's page goes into more detail, but, briefly:

• Melody Maestro is almost a musical toy rather than a serious composition tool, allowing some flexibility and giving you very complete onscreen prompts for every step. In effect, it's a "SuperJAM! wizard", allowing you to build a song one Section at a time. The primary "cool" feature is that you can sing a melody into your computer's microphone, and the program will convert what you sing into MIDI data. Variation of the style or personality within a particular piece of music is possible, but defeats the purpose.

• MS Music Producer (as well as its predecessors, Audio Tracks Professional and Soundtrack Express) is designed to create a piece of music of an exact length of time, to within one one-hundredth of a second, really quickly. Variation of the style or personality within a particular piece of music is not possible.

• SuperJAM! is a much more serious composition tool, with a higher learning curve, but it's still easy to get a lot of sound out of it in a hurry. Very complete song arrangement is possible. Variation of the band, style, or personality within a piece of music is easy.

• DirectMusic Producer is possibly the most difficult-to-learn music composition software ever made, but its depth and power are unparalleled. While it is intended for software creators and web designers, it can be wrestled into relatively easy usefulness by us lesser mortals, provided step-by-step instructions are laid out for certain specific processes (such as in our first tutorial, in which we convert a MIDI file to a WAV file).

Hey! I broke my computer!

I feel your pain. But, by necessity, Tom Smith, Pretzel Productions LLC, and Microsoft do not accept any responsibility or liability for anything that might happen to your computer, MIDI rig, or lifestyle because of the installation or use of these programs, and the programs are provided on an "as-is" basis: basically, Use At Your Own Risk. For what it's worth, I have done everything I can to make sure everything works as advertised, and I use SJam all the time, and Music Producer fairly often, with no problems.

Can you recommend a good sound card?

With MIDI, more than with any other electronic music, your choice of instrument is extremely important, because while a good instrument cannot make a bad arrangement sound better, a bad instrument can surely make a good arrangement sound worse.

Most hobbyist musicians will not be using a Roland keyboard or the newest rack-mounted synth from Yamaha or E-MU / Ensoniq. They'll have whatever allegedly SoundBlaster-compatible card came pre-installed in the computer, possibly even as part of the motherboard chip set. Along with that will likely be some form of MIDI "soft synth" -- maybe in hardware, more likely in software, about 1-1/2 to 4 MB of samples covering the basic MIDI instrument list.

Now, if it happens that the basic sound rig that came with your computer sounds fine to you -- don't let anyone bully you on this, because good onboard sound rigs absolutely do exist -- and you don't feel the need for a new sound card, great. You've just saved some money and decision making.

If, on the other hand, your sound card just doesn't thrill you the way it did when you first played Doom in stereo, then you get to go shopping.

The first thing to do is get some better speakers. It is possible to get some really tremendous speakers for $30-100. It is not possible to get them for $10, so don't even try it. Go to your favorite computer store, look at the speaker wall, listen to some goodies, and shell out the bucks for something decent, maybe with wood casing rather than plastic, certainly with a subwoofer if you can afford it. (Altec Lansing's 4.1 Surround speakers were going at CompUSA for $39.95 last I checked -- SUCH a deal.)

In the computer stores, most of the cards you'll see are by Creative (the SoundBlaster people), with the occasional Turtle Beach or Hercules, or perhaps a few generic cards with the store brand (such as CompUSA). Other cards range from $100 to over $1000, many with more features than you'll know what to do with. And that's not even covering external keyboards or rack-mounted synthesizers, which range in price and power from a $100 Casio to a $3500 Korg Triton workstation.

In-depth reviews of sound cards are beyond the scope of this site, certainly of this FAQ. I will tell you that my current system has an Audigy MP3+ and Creative's Inspire 5300 5.1 Surround Speakers, which sound freakin' amazing. Total cost: $199.90 + tax. Both these items are new, so don't look for too much of a price drop any time soon.

My older computer has a Monster Sound MX300, which also sounds fantastic (and two wood-cased 30-watt speakers I found on deep discount at Electronic Boutique a few years ago -- best $30 I ever spent on computer stuff). The problem is, its creators, Aureal and Diamond Multimedia, are currently out of the sound card business -- Aureal has in fact been bought by Creative -- and the only chance you have of finding the thing is at an online auction or at a trade show.

There are many, many other sound cards out there. If you intend to produce music professionally, your job is much tougher, because only you know what you need (to start your research, put "24/96" into a search engine such as Google). For basic to intermediate use, however, the combination of compatibility, sound quality, availability, and price makes the Audigy series hard to beat.

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