Virtual Composer - 3.6.1

A devoted Bach-pianist's dream—to build a Mac program that can notate, display, edit and play contrapuntal music, either one melodic voice at a time or all together—has grown from humble beginnings on simpler systems and smaller machines, after years of patching and refining, into an impressive if somewhat daunting collection of methods, buttons, sliders, dialog boxes and pulldown menus, by which a determined and sensitive user can eventually affect the normally lifeless and mechanical computer playback of previously (and laboriously) notated pieces in musically interesting ways. The recent port to OS X has made things compile much faster, and some limited translatability to other encodiing systems has been added; but various relics from its original design and evolutionary history still keep getting in the way. A thorough re-engineering now seems indicated in order to fully realize the considerable potential of this program, which could prove especially valuable as a unique learning aid for keyboard students and other performers.