husker
anydmusic
soens
The other thing about MQ is it doesnt support half my hardware and they arent updating it or accepting requests. IOW, for me it's incomplete and not worth the price of a new DAW.
Contacted Sound Quest today and a new version of Midi Quest is coming....
I looked at it as well - none of my four devices are currently supported. Actually, they provided me a list of supported devices, and it looks like nothing released in the last 5-6 years is supported. And zero Nord devices. Odd.
Big problem for Sound Quest has been the increasing number of Synths that ship with a free Editor even if its a cut down one with a chargeable upgrade. Sadly this means that over time the strength of the product has become its support for legacy hardware.
I know that Uni Quest was an attempt to address this by using their technology to deliver an Editor that the manufacturer could ship with the Synth with the benefit that the support was then available if the main product. They seem to have had some success with this but it is limited as far as I can tell.
Also things have changed so much over the years. When I first started using Midi Quest it was to help me get as much as I could out of what as a comparatively limited setup with many Synths having a limited number of Presets (at least in comparison to what is available today). I had limited Polyphony used tape for Audio and Cakewalk was MIDI only. There were also no VST Instruments. Having less choice meant more creativity or at least more work.
I typically use the Rhodes Sound as example for discussion. In the "old days" I had two go Synths that I would use for this with a handful of patches to use as a start point. With Midi Quest I would edit existing sounds and create new ones with varying degrees of success. Today I have more Rhodes sounds that I could ever have imagined including Lounge Lizard and what I end up doing now not really sound programming its sound tweaking. Of course the other creative part of this type of discussion is the new sounds that were created when people "failed" to create the sound they wanted OB Brass and DX Piano sounds are just two examples of this.
As we have seen from the demise of Cakewalk we are consumers in a small market and creating a product with a broad appeal that is unique and competitively priced is really hard. Arguably Sonar has a more complete MIDI implementation than Studio One yet Studio One does enough for a lot of users so what makes Sonar unique in this context effectively has no value to them. In a nutshell that's the Instrument Definition discussion, the feature has a value to me and some others but has no value to others. It is unique but has limited appeal/value.
I'm interested to see what the next version of Midi Quest has to offer based on experience I expect that there will be enough to justify an upgrade, for those of us who still enjoy using MIDI, I think the challenge is will there be enough to attract new users.