Passport Designs Inc. was a software company that created early music production software, such as the pre-MIDI SoundChaser in 1982. Other programs included Master Tracks Pro and

Encore An encore is an additional performance given by performers after the planned show has ended, usually in response to extended applause from the audience.Lalange Cochrane, in ''Oxford Companion to Music'', Alison Latham, ed., Oxford University Pre ...

History

Founding and early years

The company was founded in 1979 by Dave Kusek and John Borowicz, and incorporated in 1980, with Kusek as CEO and Borowicz as Vice-President of Development. They had previously worked together at Electronic Music Labs from 1973–76 and Star Instruments from 1976-79. The company was originally headquartered in

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, moving to Half Moon Bay, California and finally to

Foster City, California Foster City is a city located in San Mateo County, California. The 2020 census put the population at 33,805, an increase of more than 10% over the 2010 census figure of 30,567. Foster City is sometimes considered to be part of Silicon Valley ...

. Engineering offices were also briefly maintained in

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and

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the list of cities in Oregon, largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, Columbia rivers, Portland is ...

Early computer music software

The company was a pioneer in the field of computer music, introducing the pre-MIDI SoundChaser in 1982. This Apple II-based system included the Mountain Computer Music System, a programmable 8-voice wavetable synthesizer that fit in two Apple II slots, the Soundchaser 4-octave keyboard, and system software, written by Kusek, that emulated a four-track tape recorder. After Mountain Computer discontinued the Mountain Computer Music System, Passport developed the Soundchaser MX-5(MX-500) Card to use instead. The MX-5 contained a Mountain Computer Music System-compatible sound function as well as a MIDI interface and the keyboard interface of the Soundchaser Music keyboard in a single card. In 1983, composer John Melcher developed 4-Track Editor, a composing application that enabled music to be entered like a word-processor. The same year, Passport released Turbo-Traks, a 16-track version of their recording software. At this time, they also released Notewriter, a "real-time monophonic music transcriber", and Notetools, an add-on to convert Notewriter files to 4-Track Performance files. They also released a series of educational applications, written by Dr. Charles Brody.

MIDI

When the first MIDI specification was adopted in 1983, Passport put all of its development resources in this direction, licensing and developing a MIDI interface from Rittor Music in Japan and hiring Melcher to develop MIDI recording software. Composer Phil Stone was also hired at this time, first to develop audio for games on the Commodore 64, and then to port MIDI applications from Apple II to Commodore. The first of these were MIDI/2 and MIDI/4, two-track and four-track MIDI sequencer/recorders for Apple II and Commodore 64 platforms, including OEM versions of MIDI/4 for Yamaha and Korg. These were introduced at the 1984 National Association of Music Manufacturers (NAMM) trade show, the first commercially available MIDI sequencers in the United States. These were followed by Master Tracks in 1985, and Master Tracks Pro in 1986. This software pushed the Apple II to its limits, working with an optional card to extend the Apple's memory from 48K to 2M. In 1987, after Melcher left Passport, Master Tracks Pro was completely rewritten for the Apple Macintosh, and later the Atari ST series computers, and still exists for Windows and Apple O/Ses. Nine MIDI files by the company were included in

Windows 3.0 Windows 3.0 is the third major release of Microsoft Windows, launched in 1990. It features a new graphical user interface (GUI) where applications are represented as clickable icons, as opposed to the list of file names seen in its predeces ...

with Multimedia Extensions. From

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...

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, only PASSPORT.MID, and CANYON.MID ("Trip Through the Grand Canyon" composed by George Stone) remained, which are located in the MEDIA directory. Windows 3.1 only included the latter.

Other applications

PolyWriter, Passport's first music notation application, was released in 1984, followed by

, a professional music notation application capable of creating high-quality scores. The Encore feature set was 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. Passport 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 was a waveform audio editor, originally developed by Blank Software and subsequently purchased by Passport, that integrated Macintosh computers with most current digital sampler brands that supported the MIDI Sample Dump Standard, including Akai, Casio, E-mu, Ensoniq, Korg, Kurzweil, Peavey and Roland. Later versions allowed users to create a sound library that could be shared those sounds across multiple sampler formats. The final version, version 3.0, was released in 1996. The professional standard SCORE music engraving program was written by

Leland Smith Leland Clayton Smith (August 6, 1925 – December 17, 2013) was an American musician, teacher and computer scientist. He taught at Stanford University for 34 years, and developed the music engraving tool SCORE. Career Smith was born in Oaklan ...

with additions by Perry Devine of Passport Designs and released by the company in 1987. Shifting focus from music software to the nascent "multimedia" market, they introduced Passport Producer in 1992, and Producer Pro 1.0 in 1994.

Sale of the company

The company sold its assets to G-VOX in 1998, when Passport Designs ceased to exist as a company. In August 2013, G-VOX sold the rights to most of its software (Encore, MusicTime Deluxe, MasterTracks Pro, Bring Music to Life) to Passport Music Software, LLC. On 31 January 2022 Passport Music Software, LLC ceased trading and offered the company and its

intellectual property Intellectual property (IP) is a category of property that includes intangible creations of the human intellect. There are many types of intellectual property, and some countries recognize more than others. The best-known types are patents, cop ...

for sale. In mid-2022 the original developer of Encore, Don Williams, bought the company and announced a new version of Encore for an autumn release the same year.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Official website
Defunct software companies of the United States Software companies based in California Defunct companies based in California Software companies established in 1980 Technology companies disestablished in 1998 1980 establishments in California 1998 disestablishments in California