working in the music industry

[Curtin, Steven D (Steven)]

Some background on these items...

> Some years ago those issues was up again and there
> was someone who was tierd of being hired and fired
> every two months, he was working for Ensoniq writing
> software for the Ensoniq keyboards,
> if i can recall this right.
> 
This was me.  It was actually more like every three years.   All the MI
places I've ever worked (including Opcode) are either defunkt or in much
smaller spaces.  Working for Lucent seems to have paid off, when my project
gets cancelled I can just find work in another part of Lucent.

> Another case is the dude who did the ASR-X
> machine for Ensoniq and suddenly was fierd for as
> it seams to no reason at all, whit some other 20
> dudes of the engineering department!
> 
Yes, there were two big layoffs, I was part of the first one.  The second
one took out the rest of the music engineers from what I hear.

> And the last thing i heard about Ensoniq was the DSP
> engineer who made the signal synthesis algos for ensoniqs
> effect boxes was sued by Ensoniq for some paper that was
> published!!
> 
The was Jon Dattorro.  There was a case for his supposedly publishing
algorithms that were considered by Ensoniq to be trade secrets.    

> In some ways it seams that Ensoniq is no good employer!
> 
Ensoniq is a great company and it was a pleasure to work for them.  The top
management has had to make some tough decisions to keep the whole company
going at all.

They are no longer making music equipment, they were bought by Creative and
now all of the "Ensoniq" equipment is being made by E-Mu, according to a
recent article in Electronic Musician.  

> Has the Music industry been taken over by the
> economist in suits as the telecom and internet
> field has been?
> 
The reason for this is more of a basic sea change in the industry, of the
electronic music capabilities creeping out of the special-purpose keyboards
and into general purpose PCs.  Notice how much enphasis is placed in
Keyboard magazine on plugins for editing programs now.  For this reason
Ensoniq is now Creative East, a multimedia company.  

Steve C

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Steven Curtin  
Lucent Technologies Microelectronics
ph: (732)949-4404   fax: (732)949-6711
http://curtin.emf.org
sdcurtin at lucent.com
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