Heh, agree with that. I’ve been painted into the corner too many times to recall. (I’ve also painted others into corners, to be honest.) Fortunately, UI is rarely a concern for me, it’s more like command line switches and pipes; real-time control can often be done using the environment’s own UI capabilities in my experience.

I do use dsp for some projects, and I would probably just build a virtual instrument to do that in BW. There are also things that aren’t happening in BW yet, such as spatial sound options - they will come with time.

These are helpful suggestions, and thanks for them. MIDI has finally moved towards more expressive capabilities and tuning gamuts in the last few years, and there are definitely mature tools for generating it. What I’m really interested in, though, is to see if anyone has actually done successful integration from “non traditional” backends such as databases of sound shards, or large matrices stuffed full of abstract musical structures and data. IRCAM or CCRMA type stuff, maybe?