Capers

I was wondering what it would have been like to have a whole replacement OS for a PDA that was purely music based.

The intended goal of Capers was to create a "replacement music operating system" for the Palm, in effect generating a handheld music platform rather than a group of applications.

Capers used a common clock for all its "applets," and the user could page through them at will while a sequence played. There could be multiple instances of each applet; for example, three arpeggios, two sequences, and four controller LFOs could be used at once. Each applet's output (called a "Pattern") could be sequenced to create a song out of a group of "patterns." This sequence could sync in or out to a MIDI clock to talk to other sequencers such as Native Instrument's Reaktor, Akai's MPC series, Ross Bencina's Audiomulch, or even another Palm OS device running Capers. Now that would be amazing.

I can just imagine that. Running sync’d palms would be fantastic! I think it would be worth buying a few old Palm III’s just to get them all working at the same time together.