I have to say that I tried Jammer Live (the demo) and it is impressive (for $59, it's a bargain). It doesn't have the polish of an arranger keyboard but it certainly could with a little effort. It's a bona-fide real-time software-based arranger program. If Frank Rosenthal is correct and Soundtrek makes their Jammer Pro Styles compatible with Jammer Live (no reason why they shouldn't), then this will be a must-have program. One hot wish-list feature would be a style-import function but there isn't one here yet (I tried renaming a BIAB style to the Jammer Live format for kicks and as I expected it didn't work). It would be fun to be able to import BIAB and/or PSR styles into Jammer Live (someone'll figure out how). At least you can create your own styles or import midi-files-to-styles (full-version, not with the demo). You can also import style patches and/or make the exisiting styles compatible with the patches of your given keyboard. And you can assign midi notes or control parameters or a QWERTY keyboard to control the start/stop/fill functions.
The country-strumming style that came with this demo was surprisingly good, and I liked the jazz styles as well.
For a real-time arranger program, Jammer Live is better than I expected and has even greater potential with further development. I was not a fan of Jammer but this could change that. You could easily "humanize" some of these styles by exporting them as midis to a sequencer and randomly varying the velocity about 10%, then re-importing those midi files back in to Jammer Pro as styles to freshen things up a bit.
You guys that have been wishing for a digital-output arranger may want to try your Trinity's and Motif's with this program and a laptop... especially since the demo is free. Add an MFC-10 midi foot controller and you would have quite a lot of live performance options.
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Jim Eshleman
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