The Blue Ribbon SoundWorks

~ the goodbye ~

Bars & Pipes asked you to think of a MIDI track as a length of pipe. Notes flowed along it, and you picked up small programs called tools and dropped them into the pipe to bend what passed through. Quantize, transpose, anything somebody had bothered to write a tool for. Other sequencers of the late 1980s gave you a piano roll and a mixer. This one gave you plumbing, and the metaphor held all the way down. Sound on Sound called it the ultimate in Amiga sequencing, and there are still people who keep an Amiga powered up for no other reason.

It came out of Atlanta, Georgia, from a company founded in 1988 by Melissa Jordan Grey and Todor Fay. The company's name was slippery even at the time. Contemporary Amiga press refers to it as Blue Ribbon Software and as Blue Ribbon Bakery, with Toolworks turning up too, and the version that stuck in the record is The Blue Ribbon SoundWorks. Alongside the sequencer it shipped SuperJAM!, which generated accompaniment rather than recording it, and the One Stop Music Shop, a card that put an E-mu Proteus synthesizer and a MIDI interface inside the machine. There was even a personal information manager called Who! What! When! Where!, which tells you something about a small company looking for a second product.

By 1994 the thing the company cared most about was not the sequencer. It was AudioActive, an engine that generated MIDI performances in real time out of data it called styles and personalities. Blue Ribbon had taken apart how players in a given genre make their choices and built a machine for putting compositions back together differently each time. Game Developer later described the result as conceptually close to a musical Markov chain, only subtler and far more subjective. That engine is what Microsoft bought.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the date nobody wrote down ~

Nothing citable fixes the day. The clearest account is Game Developer's history of DirectMusic, which says only that Blue Ribbon Soundworks was purchased by Microsoft in late 1995 and that its principals moved from Atlanta to Redmond. Deal databases circulate 16 October 1995, but they are aggregated listings with no announcement behind them, so this grave is filed at year precision and says so.

What does carry a date is the aftermath. Amiga Update's issue of 22 January 1996 headlined it BLUE RIBBON GOES MICROSOFT and reported that Microsoft had dumped all the Amiga titles into an area on CompuServe where any Amiga user with an account could download them. Brad Webb, writing it up, admitted nobody knew the legal position and told readers to go and ask their service provider's sysop. He signed off saying Blue Ribbon would be much missed by Amigans, and that an ending like this was no great surprise in a market under that much stress.

~ what the engine became ~

Todor Fay stayed. He became the development lead on DirectMusic, which merged the AudioActive work with DirectSound and shipped as part of DirectX 6.1 in 1998. The Microsoft marketing of the period leaned so hard on real-time music generation that developers who remembered Atlanta read it as AudioActive with a new badge, and Game Developer printed that complaint while DirectMusic was still in alpha. Fay later co-founded NewBlue, which makes video tools.

The trademark had a stranger afterlife than the company. By 1998 the name AudioActive was being used by a German MPEG-2 audio player that had nothing whatever to do with Atlanta or Redmond.

~ the source release ~

On 9 December 2000, five years after the purchase, Fay sent an email that Alfred Faust posted on ANF and amiga-news.de carried the next day. He had obtained clearance to release the source code of Bars & Pipes Professional 2.0 to the Amiga community. The reasons he gave were practical ones. Known bugs could finally be fixed, and somebody could wire the Amiga code into real timing services instead of the emulated audio interrupt it had been limping along on under WinUAE. A port to Windows was on his list too, and he offered advice and assistance to anybody who wanted to attempt one.

I was sixteen that December, and the Amiga had never been a machine I had access to; everything I learned about music software I learned later and on a PC. Bars & Pipes reached me as source code and emulator screenshots rather than as a product, years after both its platform and its publisher had stopped existing. That is how a sequencer ends up with a readership instead of a user base.

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