I was intrigued, recently, to learn of a solution to the problem viewers will face when finding themselves with over two hundred TV channels beamed into their homes via cable and satellite. Acknowledging that even the most experienced remote control 'zappers' will be unable to cope with the sheer breadth of choice confronting them, media pundits envisage the system being placed under the control of a computer being capable of analysing your viewing habits and constructing a 'profile' of your personal preferences which it will use to preselect programs for you.

Leaving aside the difficulties this will cause for families (presumably we will all need our own personal TV sets), and the vaguely disturbing notion that our choices will be being made for us (the more game shows we watch, the more will be given), the MeTV scenario, as it is referred to, is, nevertheless, an interesting solution to a problem which lays only a few years into the future.

Sadly, no comparable solution has yet been devised to make life easier for musicians faced with the daunting prospect of choosing from many hundreds of sounds produced by even the most basic hi-tech system. My own set up is (deliberately) quite modest: a synth, a sampler, two sound modules, a drum machine and a couple of effects units. Yet I estimated recently that I had somewhere in excess of 6000 individual sounds available to me. Unfortunately, less than 20% of these could be considered 'readily' available - ie. at the touch of a button. Running through ten or twenty sounds on a sampler can take many minutes: loading a new bank of sounds into my synth may take a quarter of an hour or more.

None of which would be too much of a problem were there any way of guaranteeing the suitability of the selected samples or presets. But without an accurate indexing system, loading sounds can be a pretty hit and miss affair - and very time consuming. It's a problem which threatens to engulf many musicians and, as Brian Eno has often pointed out, is a real distraction from the business of producing music. Unlike Eno, I happen to believe the effort is worth it. Though tedious and frustrating, finding a sound which complements perfectly a piece of music is immensely satisfying, and is the reason I work with synths and samplers and not electric guitars.

Nevertheless, someone really needs to address the problem of cataloguing and indexing sounds. For many, the solution to non-programmability is having so many presets at your disposal that you don't need to spend time tweaking parameters. But without ease of access, it's no solution at all.