This was frustrating because I had dozens of files in Midisoft's *.mmm format, and I wasn't able to access any of them. It would crash almost as soon as it would load. Why frustrated? Well, by Win7 or so, I found that I couldn't get Studio to run anymore. So I've remained on the sideline, frustrated.

And then Forte started coming out with premium versions of Forte and these premium version were getting really expensive. So I've always said 'no thanks' to Forte, cuz I just didn't want to pay their inflated price. I don't like this sort of crippling because you can't really get anything done. Even back then you could d/l a copy of Forte.

Except this new German outfit was asking a lot for their product, so once again I balked. The early version of Forte was scarcely different. During this time, I was busy with a number of other projects and my musical output was just about nil, so Studio didn't get used much.īut this new outfit that had re-released Studio didn't last and the I'm seeing ads for Forte, and it sure looked like Studio to me. So I balked and it was years before I finally upgraded to Sonar. Instead they wanted everyone to upgrade to Sonar - at a pretty steep price, as I recall. XP broke Cakewalk's Pro Audio and Cakewalk never offered a fix. It worked pretty well, but by then I was running Win XP. Studio 6 was basically a bug fix of the earlier Studio, which was also v6, so sorta confusing.

Something like a couple years pass, and I notice Studio 6 is on the market, released by a new outfit that had bought the rights to it. But then MidiSoft went out of business, so there were no more bug fixes. I really liked Studio a lot, despite its bugs. Back in those days, I had BiaB, and I used it for rhythm sections on a few tracks, but that was about the extent of its use. I used Cakewalk's Pro Audio 8 and later 9 to complete the projects. This was the product I used to get my thoughts down into the computer for my first two albums. Between the inherent instability of Win98 and Studio's bugs, I learned to save my work early and often.

I was running Studio on Win98 back in those days and it was kinda buggy. It was my first introduction into a notation-based sequencer, and to me it was the equivalent of discovering a word processor after writing longhand all my life. I bought a copy of it back in 2000 - for about $60, as I recall. I've got a long history with this product. Wish I would have seen it before the expiry on Forte 10 Basic.

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