Passport Designs, Inc.

Passport Designs Inc. was an American software developer that created pioneering music production software and supplied MIDI files to various vendors, including Microsoft Corporation. Namely, Passport Designs created an iconic bundle of nine MIDIs first introduced in October 1991 as part of Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions 1.0 (MME) release for OEM third-party manufacturers. Two tracks, PASSPORT.MID and CANYON.MID (composed by George Stone (5) as "Trip Through the Grand Canyon") were subsequently included as default system files in Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 98 and Windows 2000 distributions. The company was founded in 1979 by Dave Kusek and John Borowicz and incorporated in California. In 1982, Passport presented SoundChaser package for Apple II: a programmable synthesizer on two Apple's "Mountain Computer Music System" extension cards, the Soundchaser 4-octave keyboard and Kusek's software emulating a four-track tape recorder. In 1983, Passport Designs focused entirely on the newly-adopted MIDI format, licensing a MIDI interface from Rittor Music in Japan and hiring John Melcher to develop MIDI recording software. Melcher subsequently developed MIDI/2 and MIDI/4 multi-track sequencers for Apple II and Commodore 64. He was also responsible for OEM versions of MIDI/4 supplied to Yamaha and Korg. Passport presented their software at the '84 trade show NAMM as the first commercially available MIDI sequencer in the United States. Two more products in the same line followed: Master Tracks in 1985 and MTPro in 1986. In 1998, Passport Designs went bankrupt and sold its assets to G-VOX Entertainment. In August 2013, G-VOX sold the intellectual property rights to most of the software to Passport Music Software, LLC. A new firm carried the business on for almost a decade, shutting down entirely in January 2022.