Hello John, Fred, Herbert, Bernie, MG, and Sherry,

Where's Mark been during all this discussion about GPO?

I've been listening; and Sherry also today gave me a very good digest about all of the GPO-related issues brought up in this thread.

I can report to you that a huge amount of work has already been done here to directly or indirectly support GPO, but has not been released yet. In fact, I did a lot of this work more than a year ago, but have not released it yet, because I wanted to package most of the GPO support in one release rather than dribble it out. Why?

Well, right now you all are blaming GPO for how difficult it is to use. That's not really fair to GPO. It offers great instrument sounds, with a lot of control, at a very reasonable price. GPO should not be blamed for the fact its interface is highly technical, with nasty MIDI controllers and such. That would be like blaming MIDI for being complicated at the level of bits and bytes. It's the job of software to make underlying technology easy to use. GPO itself doesn't attempt to offer such software with a "musical interface". That should be the notation program's or MIDI sequencer's job. That should be Composer's job! After all, Composer is both a notation editor and MIDI sequencer.

I could have dribbled out partial solutions to make GPO easier to use for Composer users. But as soon as I started doing that, Composer itself would have become the brunt of criticism about how difficult GPO is to use. That would have indeed been fair, to criticize Composer for not making GPO easy to use. But, no other notation app makes GPO easy to use either. In fact, Composer already makes GPO easier to use than probably any other notation app. This will be good marketing for Composer, to release the good GPO support all at once. I apologize that you very few folk who have struggled with GPO haven't been able to enjoy, up to now, the GPO support features that are actually already implemented.

It won't be long before some new Composer features for GPO will come out with quite a bang. Most of these GPO support features will all come out at the same time. There will be a quantum leap in how much easier it will be to get good sound out of GPO in Notation Composer.

At this time, I'm not disclosing details about what these GPO support features in Composer will be, nor the schedule for the release. If you go back and read this entire huge thread that you have all participated in, the detailed issues you have brought up only offer a glimpse at the larger scale GPO support problem that new features in Composer will solve.

Cheers
-- Mark