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anonymous 18 March 2002

Will the new Pro Tools work on a pc? Not that I'll ever be able to afford one.
But just out of curiosity, do you think they will ever offer their flagship product for the PC, if not, Why not?

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anonymous Wed, 03/20/2002 - 05:50

So then there is nothing intrinsically better about a mac for making music, other than hardware variations?
Which makes sense to me. It does seem to be a difficult task to put together an operating system that will work with all different types of hardware.
However, isn't the mac also getting into this same arena, I mean just about any soundCard I look at has Mac drivers, yet the Mac is still more stable?

Opus2000 Wed, 03/20/2002 - 08:54

The Mac is more stable due to it not having to deal with resources like the PC does and the way the OS is built..
There are certain restrictions in certain scenarios that force you to put cards in a specific order tho..but nothing like a PC..that is why a Mac is more desireable for audio recording..
Opus

anonymous Wed, 03/20/2002 - 09:10

Why do Macs not have to deal with resources?
I thought Bill Gates stole the operating system from Apple and dubbed it windows?
If OS X doesn't have to deal with resources, and this is a function of the OS, why hasn't Microsoft been able to accomplish this?
Why can someone not put together a program(an operating system) that will run all windows compatible programs? They make programs that will allow you to run them on Macs, why can't someone put together a windows compatible OS?

Greg Malcangi Thu, 03/21/2002 - 00:43

Hi Tundrkys,

If OS X doesn't have to deal with resources, and this is a function of the OS, why hasn't Microsoft been able to accomplish this?

The problem isn't just the OS but goes back to the early eighties and how IBM created the first IBM PC's. Basically, Mac's were created from the ground up by Apple and IBM suddenly realised they were in danger of losing out on this new market. The only way IBM could rush through the design of their own PC was to farm out much of the work to third parties. In the long run this meant that virtually anyone could create almost any component for an IBM compatible PC. The result is that nowadays an IBM compatible PC may not have a single IBM component inside it and probably has never been touched by IBM. Whereas pretty much everything inside a Mac is either manufactured by Apple or installed and tested by them. This makes Macs much more predictable from a programmers point of view as you don't have a virtually infinite number of possible hardware configurations as you do with PCs.

Greg

anonymous Sun, 03/24/2002 - 14:20

Greg's history is correct. Everyone wanted to buy a $1K machine when Apple sold only $2k machines. Apple's legacy will be written in text: The computer manufacturer that invented the idea of point-and-click and insist that they build and sell dedicated machines and not ideas. Apple OSX is probably Microsft Windows 2003. Apple wants to build machines with dedicated software that works. Microsoft builds software that may or may not work, depending on what machine and peripherals attached..After working in both environments: the better investment for music people is Apple, the better investment for accounting and business persons is Windows. Both operating systems have serious downfalls. Third party software sellers have tried to accomodate both platforms - with mixed success. They sell software packages that use subroutines within the devoleper codes that conflict with other developers. It's every company for itself. Protools was designed around the macintosh platform-it works. Every protools engineer that works in protools can find their way around the platform.

anonymous Sun, 03/24/2002 - 18:26

PTHD is not ready for Windows yet, but is in the works. It is not because of stability issues or that the Mac is easier to program around, it is pure laziness on Digidesigns side.They have been a Mac intensive company all along but things will change. The Mac is not an easier OS to program around nor is it any faster or stable. It is nostalgic though just like the Volkswagon bug. The new AMD systems run circles around the best Macs on DAWs with fewer stability issues. I'm talking about the AMD761 chipsets in the GA7DX, A7M266 or Abit KG7 motherboards. With a 1.33 Ghz processor in any of these motherboards you get over 100% improvement in track counts and plugins compared to the G4 Mac at any current speed with ProTools.
Since the parent company of Digidesign is Avid and they are moving more and more to the PC side for their video programs, I have a hard time believing that ProTools won't follow suit. It is too bad that so many people got a bad taste of Windows through the Win95-Win98 era. There is no doubt that Win2000 smokes anything that Mac has produced yet in the OS department as far as stability and reliability. If this weren't true, then Macs would be used for servers across this country and not PCs.
Allen :)

bsalinas Mon, 03/25/2002 - 07:38

"The computer manufacturer that invented the idea of point-and-click and insist that they build and sell dedicated machines and not ideas."

Apple did not invent point and click Zerox at the Palo Alto Research Center did.

"PTHD is not ready for Windows yet, but is in the works. It is not because of stability issues or that the Mac is easier to program around, it is pure laziness on Digidesigns side."

I think it probably has more to do with resources and alocating them to the platform of your biggest userbase.

"The new AMD systems run circles around the best Macs on DAWs with fewer stability issues. I'm talking about the AMD761 chipsets in the GA7DX, A7M266 or Abit KG7 motherboards. With a 1.33 Ghz processor in any of these motherboards you get over 100% improvement in track counts and plugins compared to the G4 Mac at any current speed with ProTools. "

What were you running on the AMD to backup this claim? You can't know unless your actually running the software on the system. Is anybody doing benchmarks for DAW software?

Do to marketing, most people don't know this but Mhz or Ghz is only one of the specs that make software run faster, you also have to know things like how many many instructions per clock cycle the processor can run, like an instruction for moving something to and from memory. Different instruction execution times (in cycles) make it difficult to compare systems based purely on clock speed, or number of cycles per second.

"There is no doubt that Win2000 smokes anything that Mac has produced yet in the OS department as far as stability and reliability. If this weren't true, then Macs would be used for servers across this country and not PCs. "

Actually in comparison to Macs you are right but Unix and Linux dominate the server market. Microsoft exist here but they do not dominate by a long shot. Even Microsoft, at least for a time, had to use Unix servers to run their site to make it more stable and reliable. Mac OSX is a Unix OS.

Greg Malcangi Tue, 03/26/2002 - 03:12

most people don't know this but Mhz or Ghz is only one of the specs that make software run faster, you also have to know things like how many many instructions per clock cycle the processor can run, like an instruction for moving something to and from memory.

Even this doesn't tell the whole story. Each make of CPU has it's own instruction set. For example the Pentium IV instruction set is quite complex, so providing the software has been compiled with a compiler that supports the full instruction set, a Pentium IV running at the same clock speed as a risc processor should in theory provide more processing muscle. Other chip features also have an effect; pipelining, on board memory cache, etc.

Greg

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