Those of you who are familiar with Sweetwater Sound's early beginnings know that it was first a local recording studio — complete with a Kurzweil K250 — and soon after became the world's largest source of third party K250 Samples on floppy.

As Sweetwater grew, the floppy inventory began filling shelf after shelf as the Soundware Library exceeded 350 titles. With the advent of CD-ROM technology, we were finally able to gather all of these high-quality files onto a more convenient set of 5 CD-ROMs. But the demand for seperately-sold instrument floppies continued to climb even as the CD-ROMs were selling as fast as we could make them.

The logistics of making/printing/applying separate labels for each floppy of each instrument set started to become a full-time job. And, although we purchased a high-speed floppy duplicator, the task of replicating multiple sets of every instrument in our library became daunting.

So we decided to make all future libraries available in CD-ROM format only, including the Ultimate Guitars, Pocket B-3, Total Stereo Session Drums, Young Chang Virtual Grand, Electron Bomb, and Sonic Arsenal CD-ROMs. While this did not please everyone, we at least kept our 10-foot shelves full of floppies from quadrupling their size.

Finally, technology has caught up with our needs and we can now offer our entire library via the Internet (thanks, Mr. Gore). This includes individual instruments from our latest “CD-ROM-Only” libraries as well. And you can now preview and possess the exact instrument you need in minutes instead of days. Simply visit our Web site at “www. sweetwater.com” or go directly to our On-Line SoundWare Sales at “www.sweetwater.com/soundware.tpl”.

One of the most exciting aspects of our On-Line Soundware is that all the money you’ve invested in individual sounds can be fully re-applied towards the price of the Sweetwater CD-ROM that contains those sounds. This means that, after a purchasing a certain number of individual instrument sounds, you can get the remaining sounds virtually for free. It also means that instruments that were previously only available on CD-ROM can now be purchased individually. We hope you'll find this new method of SoundWare distribution as easy and convenient as we do.

In other news, last month, Sweetwater Sound held its first VAST Workshop for the K2000/K2500 here at our main headquarters in Fort Wayne. It was amazing to see 71 Kurzweil fanatics coming from seven different states, all gathered in one place. We were also graced by the attendance of Mr. Charlie Won, President of Young Chang America, Mike Papa, the Vice President of Marketing, and our Kurzweil Rep, Jeff Dunmire. The Workshop was such a success that we will be looking into bringing it to various locations throughout the U.S.

Well, that's all for this issue. I'm still unpacking from the Summer NAMM Show that was held in Nashville, TN. It was a great success and you can look forward to all the latest news and new products from the show in our next issue of Sweet Notes. See ya'.

Daniel Fisher is Director of Soundware Engineering at Sweetwater Sound.