> ... there was always something fun about the idea that music directors were practically composing symphonies to be played by individual orchestras on each use

> ... there was always something fun about the idea that music directors were practically composing symphonies to be played by individual orchestras on each user's machine. And this is part of the problem - the latter part never developed. Sample playback is a lousy form of musical expression. I want a pianist AI that plays Beethoven the way I like. Unfortunately, there's little public R&D in this stuff - at one point I looked into the research for just synthesizing the sound from a MIDI recorded by a real pianist, and while some of the commercial actors have something that is okayish (Roland and Pianoteq), the public research just isn't there.