Studio Session by Bogas Productions (1986)

[Mu0n]

I uploaded a bunch of videos to increase awareness of this ancient, but capable piece of music software all the way from 1986: Studio Session Music System from Bogas Productions. Ed Bogas is the composer who made these quirky, charming music "vignettes" which showcased the software's ability to deal with many genres of music (jazz, rock, synth, classical, etc.), At 77, it's unclear whether he's still active, though he has a website: http://www.ebogas.com/who.html and a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Bogas

Studio Session made use of the free wave form capabilities of the Sound Driver, the piece of OS which predated the Sound Manager. What made it extra special was that it could play up to 6 instruments at once, beating the standard capability of the Macintosh, which could play only 4 wave forms. Perhaps the sounds were pre-mixed together in memory as they were being played back.



Studio Session is a sort of programming obsession of mine. It's a perfect gateway technology which can allow the writing of game intro tunes by leveraging this specialty software, without having to recreate a music playing engine from scratch. However, the challenge is to load a Studio Session music composition file, as well as the instrument files, which are played back at various speeds in order to imitate all the frequencies of the notes you want. I'll make a thread in the Hacking section soon about this as a sort of challenge beacon to this.

For now, enjoy these video captures I made on youtube of all the songs that came with them:

 

[ants]

Thanks for sharing this! What a beautiful user interface and the tunes are really captivating.

 

[Crutch]

Thanks @Mu0n as you know I love this old program.  That Player GUI was something special in its day, as was the combination of multiple sampled tracks of digitized waveforms.  As a young kid upgrading from MusicWorks (four tracks of fixed waveforms using the Mac’s four-wave synthesizer) to Studio Session (six tracks of arbitrary digitized sounds with this gorgeous GUI) blew my mind.  A few years later Bogas released Super Studio Session which added two more tracks (total of 8).  Unfortunately they didn’t update the Player to show tracks 7 and 8, maybe because the UI was too perfect the way it was, or maybe because it wouldn’t fit on the disks anymore.  

 

[Mu0n]

I was too used to how the tunes sounded in Studio Session to appreciate their 8 track versions, revised instrument sound files at 22 kHz instead of the original 11 kHz. Don't get me wrong, Super Studio Session is also fantastic, but since it can't run at full power on a Mac Plus, it lacks the nostalgia factor of the original. If I can reverse engineer the original SS format, it seems like it could be trivial to also do SSS.