[MPA] Request for recommendations

[Peter Kirn]

On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 02:08 AM, Scott Jacob Loehr wrote:

> Maybe I missed something, but I thought we were talking about Mac Pro 
> Audio.  OSX is still the only occasionally functional new kid on the 
> audio block.  Granted, it's the future, but it doesn't pay the bills 
> for everybody in the present.

I think folks are being overly conservative about estimates of when 
audio will be ready for primetime.

We currently have mature and stable versions of:
Ableton Live
BIAS Peak and Deck (and Peak's excellent rival Spark, with many plugins 
to boot)
MAX/MSP
Logic (now reaching its SECOND version on X)
Cubase (which has robust ReWire support, a feature we'll soon see in 
Logic, too)
Native Instruments Traktor DJ and Konktakt
Reason
Unity Session
Sibelius (who will also support OS X with their upcoming G7 guitar tab 
software)
Artmatic

. . . just to name a few.

Pro Tools is theoretically shipping now, though I haven't seen it in 
person. It should support all Digi hardware by the end of the spring.

And some major holdouts -- the Quarks of audio -- are due literally in 
the next 4 months, NOT the next 12 months:

Digital Performer
A NEW MOTU sampler we've never even had before (I'm looking forward to 
it!)
MetaSynth (which has been tweaked now to run in Classic)
Reaktor
Absynth (I think - can't recall if that announcement was official)
Jitter (companion to MAX/MSP)
Pluggo -- meaning LOTS of plugins!
Mac-only AltiVerb reverb processor plugin

The first list means that many people are already running OS X. I have 
too many items on the second list -- and I expect I'm not alone on this 
list. But by Memorial Day at the latest I don't expect to be doing any 
audio booting into 9 -- and holdouts at that point will be cautious 
(nothing wrong with that) but hardly stranded in 9.

Developers have worked really hard on this getting things up to speed 
so quickly with a number of serious challenges. It's important to point 
out that I'm NOT saying it's taken this long to basically make X what 9 
already was -- on the contrary, many of these releases are MAJOR 
upgrades to existing software, and they do indeed benefit from enhanced 
performance in many cases and certainly enhanced reliability in all 
cases.

Anyway, don't lose the faith NOW (I've been whining and complaining at 
developers for YEARS on this now). We're finally almost, almost there 
(and some people are in fact there already).

I'll be happy to document some of the rough bits for the list as we all 
make the switch.

Peter Kirn