“For 25 years, the Editors’ Choice Awards have recognized the best music production technology for artists, producers, and engineers. This year, in honor of our anniversary, we’re expanding our focus—in addition to honoring the year’s best new innovations, we’re also paying tribute to game-changing products that have shaped the way we make music.

Seer Systems Reality has been selected for a 2017 Electronic Musician Editors’ Choice Legacy Award.”

February 2017 p.20

Deepest thanks to Electronic Musician, who similarly honored Reality’s release in 1998. The Legacy Award article appears on-line and in their NAMM edition, February 2017.

Reality Check:

www.buildorbuy.org: “Wavetable & Software Synthesizers”

All MIDI Commands implemented; interactive web-based chimes and arpeggiating minisynth with real-time parametric control. Aptly termed by Rick Davies “The Best Audio Helper App You Never Heard in Your Life.”

In 1999, Seer Systems released ReMixer, a free helper app that rendered musical performances published in the SeerMusic format. Composers could create SeerMusic files with Reality, importing and creating musical elements from multiple sources. The SeerMusic files then included all of the information needed to let ReMixer recreate the performance exactly as the composer intended – track levels, synthesizer patches and parameter changes, and even effects processing were performed in real-time by ReMixer – a capability still well beyond the capabilities of any free helper app available on the Web.

Here’s a demo video from 1999 that demonstrates ReMixer stand-alone application user interface, particularly coded by Fred Malouf and David Roach. It shows how you can change the mix: level changes, mutes, solo, reverb on each track and even a global tempo and transpose setting for the entire song. Experienced electronic musicians will note that most of the tracks are being played by the software synthesizer built into ReMixer, including the lead guitar.

The Moog and Chimes demos show how Web application developers could embed synth controls in their user interfaces. Check out the way you can adjust the filter settings. This is not a simulation – these controls actually change the filter cutoff, resonance, etc. 10 years later, the SeerMusic platform is still the only one that enables this type of user experience.

Taken to 2012 processing levels, one could in principle use the system to implement a 32-channel mixing and effects board (to say nothing of a full-featured sampler) into any browser.

The real achievement here is that Reality closed the door on the old way of doing things—”changed the paradigm”—and it did so as a flawless, exemplary 1.0 software release. Obviously, you do not achieve these results without a team deeply steeped in the tradition.

Highest Rated Synthesizer in Seven Years

Buys-out Satie and initializes Native Signal Processing (NSP) support.

The problem was that Intel had committed to sell some number of Satie units and pay us royalties accordingly. But now they needed to stop 486 support and shift to the Pentium. So they did what any totally class-act company would: paid us as if sales had been maximum.

They needed us for NSP, but I have no doubt they would have treated any dispensable company as responsibly and respectfully.

19940316 Intel Development Extension #4: Unified sound bank and editor, Pentium optimization, reverb.

19921214 Seer Systems Incorporated
19921215 Satie 93 Initial Development
19921215 Stanley Jungleib (SJ) President
19921215 Dave Smith (DS) Eng Mgr
19921215 David Roach Staff Eng
19921215 Frank Kurzawa (FK) Staff Eng
19921215 Alan Fitzgerald, consulting sound designer
19921231 Intel Product Development Agreement for Satie signed
19921231 Satie Contract Specification