Hello Chris
I agree; not much traffic here anymore. Just you and me? There used to be quite a few all the time on the old forum. What a shame.
Anyway, if you're gonna try some other language(s), you might as well give "BBC Basic" a try. (It's nothing to do with BBC per se) and it is quite powerful in that it handles just about anything to do with windows. It's not too different a dialect of basic and reasonable to learn. Has the ability to bind into an exe. Supports multimedia, etc. Costs ~$50. The main thing "missing" is the MAT REDIM; you hafta kind of work around that. They have a rather extensive forum, support, etc., like a system is supposed to have. Some of its syntax and jargon takes a wee bit of getting-used-to, but the power of it is worth the trouble. If you're interested search bbcbasic.co.uk to see a page of all the various versions and commands, etc.
Meanwhile, I will have a look at QB64; I guess that's a newer version of Quick Basic which I had seen long ago.
At any rate, even if this outfit goes belly-up, the old True Basic Silver v5.33 and v5.5 serves my purposes perfectly well.
The ease of using LIBRARIES is to me one of the very important and useful features of TB; I have thousands of lines of SUBs which makes composing new programs a snap; a program becomes mostly just a list of SUBs to CALL.
For the multimedia stuff (MIDI, etc) which TB can't deal with directly, I write that part in BBC Basic and make the TB program chain to it and back. Works fine, just not elegant.
Mike C.