Since XGWorks is cropping up again in posts from users like Pilot, I thought I'd reopen an old wound for discussion. To my knowledge Yamaha abandoned XGWorks about a year ago now. The last versions went to v3.x, and some music stores are still selling what few copies remain. A Japanese-only v4 was released but Yamaha said it wouldn't be available in English.

Yamaha never provided instrument definition files for XGWorks and their latest keyboards, most notably the 9000 Pro and Tyros (though the Tyros owner's manual does mention XGWorks as the software program of choice - has anyone tried XGWorks with the Tyros?). And you can't create your own instrument definitions in XGWorks so at least on my 9000 Pro with XGWorks you can't even select any voices other than the XG voices, much less edit them. At first it looked like Yamaha was going to provide OPT voice editors for all of their top keyboards and throw their support behind Sonar 2.x as a replacement for XGworks, but they provided OPT's for the Tyros and that was all. (more about OPT: http://www.yamahasynth.com/pro/opt/index.html) This is a drag because the voice editors which come with their PLG-series voice expansion cards work only with XGWorks and nothing else. I would have thought since the voice expansion cards work in the omni-popular Motif that Yamaha would rush to make OPT voice panels for the PLG cards but they didn't. Yamaha never even released a basic XG OPT voice editor, which defies common sense. While there are many stand-alone XG editors around, OPT panels are meant to work within the sequencer program. XGWorks has wonderful XG voice editing within it's sequencer application, but you can't choose or edit any of the other internal voices of your keyboard with XGWorks if you own a Tyros or 9000 Pro (and probably others like the PSR-2000 but I haven't checked).

So XGWorks is abandoned and crippled, and Yamaha has left many of it's keyboard owners and PLG users adrift when it comes to software for sequencing and voice editing. I sent Yamaha support and Steve Deming in particular several questions about all of this last year and asked what their plans were to provide either new instrument definitions for XGWorks or OPT voice editing panels for the keyboards that have no voice editing apps currently. Steve responded on behalf of Yamaha that they would get back to me. That was last year... I'm still waiting...

[This message has been edited by The Pro (edited 05-22-2003).]