Passport Designs

~ the eulogy ~

Dave Kusek and John Borowicz had already spent six years together at two synthesizer companies when they started Passport Designs in 1979, incorporating it the following year out of Montara, California. Their first real product predates MIDI entirely. SoundChaser, in 1982, was an Apple II with a Mountain Computer synthesizer card in two of its slots, a four-octave keyboard, and software Kusek wrote that made the whole assembly behave like a four-track tape recorder.

When the MIDI specification was agreed in 1983 the company threw everything at it. They licensed an interface design out of Rittor Music in Japan and shipped MIDI/2 and MIDI/4, two-track and four-track sequencers for the Apple II and the Commodore 64, at the 1984 NAMM show. Those were the first commercially available MIDI sequencers in the United States, and Yamaha and Korg both sold rebadged versions of the four-track one. Master Tracks arrived in 1985 and Master Tracks Pro in 1986, rewritten for the Macintosh in 1987 and then ported to the Atari ST.

The other half of the catalog was notation. PolyWriter in 1984, then Encore, which was serious enough for professional scoring and got cut down into MusicTime for people who were not scoring professionally. Encore went into a very large number of school music departments and stayed there. Passport also published SCORE, Leland Smith's engraving program, which is still what a certain kind of publisher means when they say the notation looks right.

The first MIDI file i ever heard was almost certainly canyon.mid, out of C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA, on a machine that was not bought for music. Everyone with Windows in the nineties had that file whether they knew it or not, and it played through whatever synthesizer the sound card happened to have, so it sounded slightly different on every computer in the country. It had a Passport Designs address on it in a sense nobody ever read.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

The reason Passport matters more than its size suggests is that it was there first, at the moment the hardware became standard. MIDI made every synthesizer on the market speak the same language in 1983, and within a year there was software you could buy that recorded what you played on one and played it back into another. Passport was the company that had it in the shops.

Master Tracks Pro then set out the conventions: tracks as horizontal rows with a graphical editor sitting over them, recorded in real time against a click. That is what a sequencer still looks like in 2026, in tools that have no idea where the layout came from. Alchemy, the sample editor Passport bought from Blank Software, did the equivalent job on the other side, talking to Akai and Kurzweil samplers over the MIDI Sample Dump Standard when almost nothing else would.

~ the unraveling ~

Two things went wrong at once. The competition got much better funded, and the professional end of the market drifted toward the sequencers that came bundled with hardware or that had audio recording built in alongside the MIDI. Passport's answer in 1992 was to leave for the multimedia authoring market with Passport Producer, and Producer Pro after it, which meant spending the company's development budget on a category that Macromedia was about to own outright.

By 1998 there was no company left to fix it. The assets went to G-VOX, a Philadelphia outfit better known for guitar teaching hardware, and Passport Designs ceased to exist. The name stayed on the boxes because the products still sold.

~ the file in the media folder ~

Nine Passport MIDI files shipped with Windows 3.0 and the Multimedia Extensions. Windows 3.1 kept only canyon.mid, "Trip Through the Grand Canyon", composed by George Stone. Windows 95 through Windows 2000 carried that one and passport.mid, and after that they were dropped. For roughly a decade the most widely distributed piece of music in the world was a demo file made by a company most of its listeners could not have named.

The software outlived the company by a long way. G-VOX sold Encore and the rest of the catalog to a newly formed Passport Music Software in august 2013. That company put itself up for sale on 31 january 2022, and later the same year Don Williams, who had written Encore in the first place, bought it back and shipped a new version. The corporate entity died in 1998. The score editor has now had three owners since and is still being updated by its original author.

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