OPENSEBJ: 110.000+ DOWNLOADS

His name is Sebastian Gray. He's also called Seb, Sab & Saba. None of the few free Windows audio sequencers out there he really found an inkling for. He also found there weren't enough Open Source ones. So he started OpenSebJ because he had a bit of an itch to scratch. It's an audio production & mixing tool for Windows, written in C# .Net 2.0 with DirectX. It features a Sequencer, Beat Box, Wave Recording, Frequency Modulation, DJ Scratch interface, MP3 support and a playback sampler. An itch?

Tell us about your motivation to do such a project, and a bit about the history of OpenSebJ.

"I like to think that I do this because I'm altruistic, well at least thats what the Open Source part is about - the audio component is an area I thought I could contribute to and continue to innovate in. OpenSebJ isn't my first foray into audio sample mixing, originally I started out with a program called Beat It - written in Visual Basic 6 and linked to DirectX (it's still on Source Forge for prosperity and hasn't been touched in years); it was based on a similar concept - assign audio samples to keys and tap out a beat - this was all where it originally started. At the time you needed to purchase some high end MIDI equipment to get the same result for what I was giving away.

"Although 'Beat It' never received any where near the amount of downloads that OpenSebJ has (110,000+), it did receive enough attention for me to learn a lot about the internet and marketing. The first one being don't chose a name which is either a synonym for an every day term or clashes with a proportion of media assets or products already using the same name - although it was aptly named and very descriptive it did have the unfortunate fate that a one Mr Jackson had used it as the name for one of his most popular tracks;

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