A Barking Dog

Unless you were living in a cave or sleeping off a bender, it was difficult to imagine missing the annoucement on Monday (and the rumors over the weekend) that Apple will switch to Intel processors over the next two years. This will make the third major switch for Apple, once prior in the switch in architecture from Moto 68k to PPC then from Mac OS 9 to OSX. Considering the gravity of the changes, they did pretty well during those transitions. I know most of y’all use Windows, and most sound reinforcement apps are Windows based but what exactly, if any impact will this have on pro audio, particularly sound reinforcement?

The recording guys will likely see more impact than we will. It’s no secret that Apple and Digidesign have no love loss over the events of recent years. Apple would prefer you to use Logic and Digi would prefer Apple stayed the hell out of the recording software biz. Depending on how ProTools is coded, that could mean the difference between it being ported to Intel or being left to die. I’m sure guys with big investments in PT HD rigs are a bit nervous right now even though based on past experiences with Apple platform transitions Apple will continue to support the legacy gear for a few years. There is a translator in the form of something called “Rosetta” which demoed beautifly with PPC native versions of MS Mac Office and a fully loaded Photoshop. MS as well as Adobe are on board as well as Mathematcia developer Wolfram. The Wolfram porting explaination was remarkable, with a single developer changing only 20 lines of code (in a complex million line plus app) and was able to do the port in a few hours, including compiling time. Apps that are using the Apple dev tools and Cocoa APIs look to be a pretty easy port, though processor specfic code and Altivec routines will have to be replaced and those two techniques are used quite a bit in high performance real time apps. I’m sure Motu will port Performer because it’s largely a vehicle for interface sales. The rub here is if Digidesign will bother to port Pro Tools, or leave it lay. Pro Tools on Mac is still a pretty big hunk of revenue to just bail out on. Particularly if they can port it fairly easily.

On the sound reinforcement side, it doesn’t seem to be so bad for the simple fact there isn’t that much of our sort of software that runs natively on a Mac. Most people either emulate it with VPC or get Wintel laptops and call it a day. Yes Virginia, Smaart Live has been running on OSX natively for a while now. I heard about it a while ago and it’s been publically posted and dicusssed in other places. I’d reckon SIA will port it and the other live FFT programs will likely port as well. Spectra Foo seems like a no brainer as does MacFOH though I’m fairly certain both apps use code optimized for G4/G5 and Altivec so it may be a little more involved. Yamaha’s Studio Manager control surface librarian/control program will most likely run as is using Rosetta as it appears to be a ported (poorly) version of the Windows counterpart with no special features.

I think the platform change could be a boon for SR pros using Macs (listening, ERC?) Most of the control apps for SR didn’t work well in emulation mostly due to timing and resource issues. With the platform being native to the same processors as the Windows counterparts, SR users could benefit in one of two ways. Only one of which requires any action on the part of developers of SR apps. It’s no secret that developers of apps for pro audio, particularly in the SR realm may not enjoy the resources of other larger established software companies. Some use contractors for some of it, some don’t have enough developers and on thin margins already, are hesitant to hire more programmers. Many of them aren’t familiar with the PPC archtecture and even if they are, probably don’t have the time or budgets to do full Mac ports. Some of these apps will be ported, but even if they aren’t there is still something that could run these Windows apps, natively with full functionality.

OS X has been running on Intel for about five years now, being developed concurently with the PPC version. At one time in the early builds (’97) of Rhapsody something called “Red Box” was able to run Windows software natively without having a copy of Windows. That’s how WINE works, the Linux package that allows you to run native Windows apps on Linux (and other x86 *nix) boxes. You may have to copy over some application specific DLLs but I’d reckon that any of the more or less basic control apps that operate over USB or ethernet and perhaps converted serial (SB2, London, Audiocore, perhaps Hi Q net, various control programs from Ashly and tc among others) At this point, Apple has yet to confirm a Windows API translator (that’s really what Red Box and WINE are) but it makes perfect sense. It’s the perfect pitch for those occasions where there is a vertical app, like Hiretrack for example, where you could have the cool features of Mac OS, but still run those pesky Windows apps you need to get your job done.

I’d say that’s a winning solution. Except of course for Microsoft.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 at 1:34 am and is filed under Barking Dog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.