This IS fascinating. But where does this Liontracs come from? I'm NOT trying to challenge, Domenik, but has Liontrak produced anything else in the past? What's the 'SM-X expander' advertised on the website? Is that also a Linux-based product? Has that been released yet?

Like I say, it seems truly amazing, but sounds too good to be true, and I think others in the forum too want to see something concrete about the company/development of the product/audio demos.

Replying on this forum must indeed be very time-consuming for you, and inconvenient amidst your heavy schedule. But remember that you have a big potential market here on SynthZone, and creating interest here (as you are successfuly doing) are sure to create a number of future sales of such a great and novel product.

Also, why don't you guys update your website? At least reply to the FAQ's people are posting. I know you said that audio demos and specs are on their way, but you would certainly succeed in creating an early interest in your product if you posted a high-quality photo of the keyboard, showing off all its buttons, features etc.
Remeber having a good website goes a long way in creating a good image of your product in peoples' minds - even if you haven't yet released your product.

Kind regards,

Zalman

Hi friends
here is the link where you can see the arranger editor GUI


Seq24 v0.4.3

(click for larger view)
http://www.filter24.org/seq24/screenshot.v43.png

Cheers

Hi folks, sorry for the late answer, I was quite busy as always ;-)

a few answers:
aliev wrote "But Benno not answered my questions -- he simply refer to free software "all is possible" mantra. Yes, it is all possible to code in open platforms: but what you already coded and what I must to code by myself to provide music rendering with style morphing and karma-like functions? Nor Benno neither you even touch this arranger-specific topics, only general words about Linux/opensource blah-blah-blah in agressive marketing style. "

;-)

I'm not a marketing droing, I'm sorry I base the things I say on facts and in particular source code. ;-)
I'm not the person that writes the arranger/styleplayer for the mediastation this is why I do not touch that subject. But as as domenik said the Mediastation will run on a special version of the seq24 sequencer for linux whose features were described above by domenik.
To make aliev happy besides than including "traditional" style players, we are in contact with a computer music research lab at an italian university and they are among the leaders in manipulation of symbolic manipluation of music. They are interested to contribute to the Mediastation.
How about style players capable of improvisation and other weird stuff that requires much more intelligent algorithms than those that run a "stupid" style player which is nothing more than a sequencer where you can switch the patterns in real time.

aliev (and others) just enlist your wishes here on the forum and I will forward them to the computer music researchers and let you know if this can (and will) be done.

aliev wrote: "Why you will be negotiating only with VSTi-makers? ..."

Never said that, I said we will make the Mediastation as open as possible so that both open source developers (those that release the source code of their apps) and commercial players that want to sell their plugins/apps can provide thirdparty modules for the Mediastation.

aliev wrote "To your "open source" claim. What will be provided in CVS (all software or not all and under what license -- GPL, LGPL, Artistic Soft etc ..."

Well most of the software will be GPL and some libraries LGPL so that developers of commercial modules can link their apps to the libraries and modules needed to work in the Mediastation enviroment.
Perhaps there will be some binary only, proprietary firmware loaders, but that's about it and will not pollute the Mediastation's enviroment in any way.
Of course CVS, developer mailing list etc will all be here.
We do not believe much in the proprietary software model ... just look at how rapidly the Linux OS is expanding. And companies make money too (IBM, HP, Dell, Red Hat, Suse etc).

One would say, if you release the code your competitors can copy it and release a similar product profiting off your hard work.
Well this is true only in part thanks to the GPL license. The GPL license requires that you release modifications to the code, this means that if a competitor enhances let's say our style player he is required to release the source code modifications this means we can use it too.
Plus think about it .... developing audio software is not that easy, in the linux domain we have quite some lead over other (potential) competitors.
This means even if they take our sources they will need quite some time to study them and get familiar with them and as always the developers of the apps itself are those that know the code best (like their pockets I would say ;-) ).
I think the success of the Mediastation lies into a combination of good hardware, a team of developers that writes good open source software, code and idea contributions that come from the developer/user community.

aliev wrote: "And I am think about small investing project: to add some chunks of music learning software to your Mediastation and became VAR of such "music learning Mediastation" here in Moscow. Other keyboards can't accomplish this project right now."

Exactly, such third party modules/services will be possible and very welcome because it increases the value of of the Mediastation product.


aliev: small preliminary hint: you said you want to write music learning software. All of the software modules that power the Mediastation, like MIDI players, MIDI chip sound parameters, audio players, software samplers, user interfaces, lamps on the keyboard etc are managed by an internal message passing system.
This means you can record every event that occurs and store it on disk and "play it back" later.
This would be ideal for music learning software since you could just make your own demos by simply using the Mediastation and then store the result. The student can play back the demo seeing the same actions that you performed in the demo.
Of course for music learing some additional features are needed but this event system will be a solid base for developers to build upon since they can control pratically everything from within their apps.
We even plan export to Sysex, this mean you can fire up your sequencer and store all the Mediastation setup in a midi sequence or let se sequencer drive the mediastation automagically.
Eg let the sequencer start the playback of a DVD on the video out while firing up the style player configured with the wanted style, setting up the midi routing matrix for complex combi sounds etc ...

Ok I need to stop otherwise I risk aliev accusing me of agressive marketing ;-)
... just kidding ... anyway the event system is here and it is really powerful just a bit more patience so that you will be able to touch it with hands and make your judgements (and perhaps contributions to make it rock even more ;-) )

elle wrote "On the sampler issue: can you shed some more light?"

the sofware sampler we will integrate is linuxsampler (written by me and some other linux audio developers).
http://www.linuxsampler.org (there is only an experimental version online for now, but we have a development version in the works that supports full AKAI / GIG playback.

Not sure when linuxsampler will make it into the Mediastation, I guess a few months, but at that point expect to just take your multi-gigabyte sample library , put the CD into the Mediastation and start playing.

For the beginning the sampling capabilities of the Mediastation will probably be a bit limited but as said above a simple pressing of the UPDATE button (while being hooked up on the internet) and a few mins of downloading will bring your mediastation on the state of the art.
This means linuxsampler will be automatically downloaded and installed, this means the users that bought the Mediastation from day 1 will just have the same software as those that bought it several months later.

Your hardware investment will never be obsoleted. And since it is all opensource, even should Lionstracs go out of business (hopefully not ;-) ) the Mediastation and its community will always live and evolve. Can other keyboard say the same ?

Plus if you are a hardware freak you can even tune and boost your Mediastation yourself by changing mainboards, CPU, RAM, etc.

About the new website I spoke with the web guys and I guess it will be ready in about 10-15 days with audio/video demos following a bit later, but at least you will see pics of what kind of circuit boards are under the hood of the Mediastation.
I know there are just too much vaporware projects around or projects that fail before they are released on the market.
So from an user's standpoint it is better to be a bit sceptical until the iron cannotbe touched with hands at least at a music tradeshow, in a store etc.
I say you only one thing: I would not work for a vaporware company or a company made up of marketing droids with no real product of business model (dot-bomb style companies that made the "new economy" fail), that would simply go against my own principles.

cheers,
Benno

Hi Benno,

Yes, I already tracked that you had to be the "sample guy". Quite anxious to see how your project will turn out in "a few months" (is that a promise?);
It won't be easy. The heat is up in the disk-based softsampler land: Mach5, Kontakt and... the upcoming Giga 3.0.
Exiting times. Keep up the good work.

ellle

It sounds as if you are making the "mother of all keyboards". I worry that it may try to do so much that it is not user-friendly, and may be too expensive. However, if you can produce such an arranger keyboard for a reasonable price, you will most certainly experience success beyond your wildest dreams. Good luck!
DonM

Most interesting to me is notion of sbenno about symbolic calculations in music. It can be breakthrou in styles.

Well, I will be waiting until Mediastation will be available to me in hardware, software and documentation. This is usual in open source projects: core team not as open as many people can think.

With regards to improving the arranger functions:

I would like to see the better features of the current keyboard arrangers duplicated (e.g. dynamic arranger, etc.) BTW, I really like the way Synchro Stop is done in Ketron keyboards - a quick press on the left-hand keys will cause it to stop. This is better than stopping it whenever the left hand keys are lifted. You might consider making this type of operation a configurable option.

The symbolic programming sounds interesting; however, my concern is that it should be useable by the performing players (easy to cotrol). I am not familiar with Karma functions, but Yamaha has control over "Grooves and Dynamics". It would be nice to have real-time control over these, so that one could "funk-up" a style in mid-play.

REgards,
Alex

Ciao Ailev
I'm happy if you in future will help benno in development software. If you have good idea, sure we will integrate it in our system. How you say, this is really first keyboard OPEN SOURCE, it mean that all musician/engineers can develope in it, fix and add more new function!

About your post for the PA-X...now you can understand that they try to start at low price, but then if you want to have a complete keyboard, you are close the 4500$ or more.
About mediastation X-76, base version, the END USER price is about $ 6000, why we in italy we have 20% TAX, it mean: $5000+20% TAX=$6000. Germany have only the 17%, USA about 9.5%...
Every country have a different price of course.
Anyway, always forget to say..... Madiastation HAVE a 24 STEREO INPUT Mixer, 4 Stereo BUS, 4 MIC Inputs... then let me know how much cost so big mixer there...
add this cost and then yoy dont have a mediastation??

Domenik

Domenik,
Pls make sure the arrangers functions buttons such as the fill, etc are on the left side like the popular arranger keyboards out there and near the playing keys. EKO does not appear to have those, so they ruled themselves out of arranger market !

Price is still way out of my range though. If you get it down to below 2k that will be very good. I don't need 24 inputs, etc - just the basic features like the PSR2100.

Hi
dont worry, all the arranger keys are positioned to the left side.
here you can see the PDF layout of the Mediastation front panel: http://www.lionstracs.com/FrontX76.pdf

One news more, yust today we have tested the first Beta of Linuxsampler and we can read all the GigaStudio .GIG library!
The standard mediastation will shipped with AMD CPU Athlon 2Ghz and had play about 180 Voice with the Linuxsampler! Now you know how much data library you can load, all in realtime.
End this month, Sbenno will testing the AMD 64bit Opteron too and then you will informed of how many MORE sampler Voice and Synth Voice we can offer in this keyboards.
So, you get standard 256 Voice made by Dream DSP hardware, + you can ADD more 2 wavetable 128 Voice each, 180 Voice from Linuxsampler and about 120 Voice from the Softsynth.
In COMBI mode, we can reall 8 Layer sound, from where you want, now you can understand the final impact!
Soon I will post some new mediastation hardware pics, how is made inside ( 11 new own PCB boards, + CPU board AMD!)Of course you can see the 24 stereo IN Mixing PCB too, with the MAIN XRL MIX Out, the Xrl CUE Mix Out...116dB Dynamic range.
We DONT put PC mainboards and some USB controller in one case...
For that system, you need yust buy one standard PC, add the same USB controllers and external TFT Touch screen and you do the same like a lot of company. But is really working in all the parts? May you play in live mode?

Again, to be patience, we are at the NAMM 2004 and then all our words are reality.
cheers