Apple to purchase Avid / Digidesign??

[sjoko]

Interesting rumor going around that Apple is going to purchase Avid. Its a rumor, but it would not surprise me at all, seems to make good sence for Apple, and Avid shares have been declining.

The thing to wonder about is - how safe are Pro Tools users (and third party PT developers) if Digi falls in the hands of a "non-audio" parent?

 

[MadMoose]

Interesting, so one patched up but slightly wounded ship might be trying to save another sinking ship? Hmmm... Sometimes it's fun to watch a blood bath.

Digi has been in the hands of a non-audio company for a long time. Avid doesn't deal with audio at all. The last thing I heard were rumors of a management buyout from Avid but that was a few months ago.

 

[anonymous]

One would have to hope that a company like Apple trying to be hip with I-tunes and I-pod, would not like to be seen to be putting a bullit in the head of the 'hip' music industry.

 

[Marc Edwards]

My guess is that if it happens, then ProTools will be on OS X damn soon, and probably much more stable as well. Final Cut 3 is a fine piece of s/w, I'd love to see Apple give a bit of it's 'treatment' to ProTools. How cool is the new iMac?

We're all forgetting that the entire technology industry has taken a dive. Bring it on!

 

[audiokid]

I'm with you on that Mark!

Apple is pretty much a unix operating system, Sony (rumor has it) is based around unix now. Apple and Unix have IMO been the pro audio/video/server choice for some time. If you want to do any audio streaming on the web unix is the only way to go. hmmm

Two thumbs up on this.

 

[Ang1970]

It's no secret, the Oxford has been based on Unix for some time now.

 

[Bob Olhsson]

According to a friend of mine who used to be the sysop for one of the world's major electronic music facilities, doing audio in Unix has always been a very mixed blessing.

The good news was that you weren't locked into the overhead of the Mac's graphical interface, Unix boxes generally had a lot more raw processing power than Macs (which is no longer true) and programming was a lot easier.

The bad news was that squashing bugs was so hard that he generally needed to port code over to a Mac in order to find the bugs. In addition, when you require a graphical interface, you can't access processing power dynamically on demand in a true multitasking, memory-protected, virtual memory environment. Yes, the background tasks never slow down or crash the rest of the machine but foreground tasks can never grab more processing power either so all things being equal, a lot of stuff is likely to slow down from what we are used to.

The reason Unix is more reliable is because most applications involve decades of government-financed code that is well understood, has been debugged for years and is available to anybody in the public domain. Unfortunately audio does not benefit from that solid legacy code base.

I would strongly advise people to not assume that audio applications for system X are going be as reliable as what we have become used to on the Mac over the past five years.

 

[Jay Kadis]

Audio (or any real-time data acquisition) is certainly potentially problematic with the Unix OS (or any multi-tasking OS), but a lot depends on the implementation of drivers and the exact interaction of code blocks that determine priorities for tasks deep within the OS. Having spent a lot of time working with DEC RT-11 OS, which was developed to avoid having to use Unix on PDP-11 machines in real-time applications, I have my doubts.

We've been doing some work porting Linux audio apps to the OS X environment at CCRMA and there are problems. Whether they're surmountable is not clear: our programming experts have trouble getting the required low-level information from Apple. The frequent updates to OS X are becoming a problem, as the audio code has been altered several times already.

Whether we'll get reliable multitrack I/O from this OS depends on a lot of factors, not the least of which is Apple's committment to support of real-time applications. They seem to be saying their support is there, but we heard that from Steve Jobs a decade ago when we bought into the NeXT computer and that didn't work out.

 

[Marc Edwards]

It wouldn't be a smart move for Apple to lose any of it's existing audio or video market share. Actually, that would be total suicide.

My guess is they'll be working quite hard to nail real-time apps. If they don't I'll have to buy a PC