Passport Designs Inc.
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Passport Designs Inc. was founded in 1980 by David Kusek. Passport was a pioneer in the field of computer music software and created applications for a variety of early personal computers, including those made by Atari, Commodore and Apple.
Passport was also a primary developer of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) standard, which has been adopted by virtually every music software and hardware developer.
Passport Trax was early and groundbreaking software that allowed the recording, sequencing, playback of data produced by electronic instruments. Trax evolved into into the very popular MasterTracks and MasterTracks Pro sequencing programs.
Encore was a powerful music notation software package used by composers to create high quality scores. The feature set of Encore was modified and adapted to different markets and sold as Rhapsody, MusicTime and MusicTime Deluxe. There was also a version called music@Passport, an attempt to integrate web based music publishing into a desktop notation editor. The MIDI files passport.mid and canyon.mid were created by and included with the various distributions of the Passport notation products.
Memphis was a guitar tablature creation application that offered an easy to use drag and drop interface that enabled the user to create and print easy to read tabs.
Alchemy, created by Donny Blank, was marketed by Blank Software until the company and product were purchased by Passport. Alchemy was a powerful and highly flexible waveform audio editor that integrated Macintosh computers with digital samplers. Formats supported included the following: Akai S900, S950, S1000, S1100 (MIDI and SCSI), Casio FZ series, E-mu Emax, Emax II (MIDI and RS-422), SP-1200 (MIDI) and EIII (SCSI), Ensoniq Mirage, EPS and ASR10 (MIDI and SCSI), Korg T1, T2 and T3 (SDS), Kurzweil K2000 (SMDI), Peavey, SP/SPII and SX (SMDI), Roland S-50, S-330, S-550. Later versions allowed users to create a library of sounds on their computer, then share those sounds across multiple sampler formats. Because it was the only tool of its kind to support all these formats as well as the Apple Sound Manager 3.0 and Digidesign Sound Accelerator, AudioMedia, Sound Tools and Protools cards as well as any sampling device that conforms to SMDI or MIDI Sample Dump Standard, this product was legendary and sorely missed upon the demise of Passport. The latest version released commercially was version 3.
Passport shifted focus from music software and focused effort on multimedia content creation software, with the introduction of Passport Producer in the early nineties. Competition from Macromind/MacroMedia Director, coupled with the atrophying of the core music product line, lead to the sale of some of the company assets to GVOX in 1998. Certain portions of Passport's product line are sill marketed under their original names: Encore, MusicTime Deluxe, and MasterTracks Pro. Passport Designs ceasd to exist as a company in 1998.
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