This was announced today:
Leaders in their respective fields, Garritan, MakeMusic, Steinberg and Yamaha have formed a partnership that will provide integrated solutions to the music education market in the United States.
Announced at Winter NAMM 2008, the Music Education Software and Hardware (MESH) initiative brings together hardware, software, sound content and curriculum to provide compelling and complete turn-key solutions for today’s music educators, who are often faced with an array of products that can be difficult to navigate and integrate. In addition to aggregating four major components of music education technology into a seamless bundle, the alliance will also provide training to teachers based in the U. S., enabling them to fully utilize the power of computer music technology solutions.
Honestly, why? It sounds to me like a way for school teachers to waste money. Again. Spending thousands of dollars or more on some “solution” to make kids learn better. Money like that could be spent on lowering the student/teacher ratio. Very strange bedfellows as well. Leaders in their fields? Marketing speak at it’s finest!
For MakeMusic’s part, if you are so into the education thing now (instead of keeping Finale the top notation package), how come SmartMusic STILL does not run on Mac OS X 10.5? How come the interface is something out of the 90s? How come you have a partnership with Garritan, who makes excellent sample libraries, and you bundle Finale with a version of their libraries, but hobble SmartMusic with Nintendo video sounds? How come most all the live audio accompaniments don’t have accurate ratings? How come we can’t make multiple playlists? How come it just doesn’t work right?
Sounds more like these four companies are worried about Avid. Avid owns Sibelius, Digidesign (ProTools), and M-Audio. They had some new things at NAMM such as:
Sibelius have also launched three new software products designed for young people. The Groovy range, as it’s called, gives children graphical stimuli, which helps them to interact with the musical content in the programme, and teaches them the fundamentals of scoring, notation and structure.
I’d be a little scared as well……now if Sibelius could come out with something similar to SmartMusic……..