Shoutout to Colin

[Peter Bogdanoff]

I confess to being the producer/designer of the Mozart "Dissonant" Quartet CD-ROM back in the day. Colin and my stays at Voyager overlapped for a time.

Robert Winter, the author of the program had the foresight to retain rights to the content. I work with him at UCLA and we have been working to re-release the programs as circumstances allow.

Another version of one, Dvorak's "New World" Symphony, has been out for a while. I programmed it in iShell, and have intentions to convert it to RunRev:
	http://www.artsinteractive.org

The issue of intellectual rights is a great discussion. It's important to note that copyrights do expire at some point....

In our case the issues were a personal one that I can't get into, and the difficulty with licensing the recorded music that is a critical part of the program. We're happy to have now worked out a deal with major recording company and are on a trajectory to bringing back this stuff to life.

Also, a major holdup with a lot of the material in the past was the difficulty with distribution. Voyager was always bedeviled by it. Where did you sell these physical products in the pre-Internet days? Software stores charged for shelf space and no other brick and mortar really carried much. So sales were mostly catalog/mail order to libraries, and individuals who happened to find out about them.

Of course, that has all now changed.

And, I am happy to be now using RunRev to accomplish the cross-platform things we couldn't do in the misty past, as well as entering the mobile world.

Peter Bogdanoff
UCLA

On Jan 3, 2013, at 11:18 AM, Richmond <richmondmathewson at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Somewhere in the Attic of my house in Scotland there is a voyager CD of something to do with music by Mozart, and as
> far as I remember, it was rather good stuff; and, luckily, in the attic there are 5 Macs that can cope with it - the best being
> a 5200 something; and, down the stairs there are 3 iMacs slot-loading all running Mac OS 9. I hope to get over there in the Summer
> and arrange for quite a bit of that stuff to be transported to Bulgaria (especially my dear BBC Master).
> 
> Now, I don't know who produced the Mozart CD, but I would be quite prepared to buy a version that functioned on a contemporary OS,
> say Debian derivative linux!
> 
> I really wonder if the chap who wrote the software and had the idea realises that with a small amount of effort s/he could
> re-jig the thing for the current market. However s/he doesn't stand a chance if some middle-man (publisher) is sitting on the
> thing and won't let her/him do that.
>