When Steve Jobs introduced iTunes at last month’s Macworld Expo in San Francisco, he billed it as the impetus behind a desktop music revolution comparable to the desktop video revolution supposedly started last year by iMovie. The software he introduced has a great deal of potential for home entertainment, combining MP3 encoding, Internet radio, and CD burning (only with built in CD-RWs so far, though workarounds are springing up). In fact, it might be the perfect application for John Cusack’s character in the film High Fidelity, whose ultimate goal in life (when he wasn’t compiling “Top Five” lists) was to create the perfect pop music compilation. The comparison to iMovie, however, doesn’t quite hold up.

The promise of iMovie is to allow any Mac user to easily turn their computer into a digital video studio through a combination of hardware (a digital camcorder) and software (iMovie, or, the parallel professional application, Final Cut Pro). The promise to turn a Mac into a digital audio studio began sixteen years ago, however, at another industry trade show held annually by the National Association of Music Manufacturers (NAMM). The 1985 NAMM show featured first appearances by Mark of the Unicorn, Passport Designs, and Digidesign. Among other attendees were David Oppenheim, who would later co-found Opcode; and David Ziccarelli, who would develop the first DX7 software editor, port MAX to the Macintosh while at Opcode, and found his own company, Cycling ’74.

At this year’s NAMM show, held about a week after Macworld a few hundred miles further south in Anaheim, Apple and Yamaha teamed up and demoed a system much closer to the iMovie model. I foresaw this demo in my last Macworld column, after the August 2000 New York Expo, when I said the following:

Yamaha is presently developing the mLan (or “music LAN”), a system that transmits both digital audio and MIDI over FireWire. In another year, we may see a fully functional digital studio rig built around a small and silent G4 Cube.

I only missed out on the timing. This very setup, G4 Cube and all, was displayed at a small booth just off the show floor. This was Apple’s first appearance at NAMM in several years, which is encouraging despite their rather minor presence. I wish that Apple had made as big a splash with their mLan collaboration as they did with iTunes.

Copyright © 2001 David Ozab, dozab@atpm.com. David Ozab is a Ph.D. student at the University of Oregon, where he teaches electronic music courses and assists in the day-to-day operation of The Future Music Oregon Studios.