okay, what are you getting at?

Nothing. Just making noise. It's been awful quiet in these parts.

Okay, I'll stir the pot for fun. How about the dreaded word - LATENCY?

Ya... when will it be insignificant. Two years or less I predict the next be jump. Whomever gets this one down will be king. My system seems pretty quick, but I haven't put it under serious load.

I've learned to live with it. I get between 10 - 20ms of latency even with a fair(24 +) track count. My cpu isn't particularly fast by today's standards. 2.8GHz quad core. I've considered going to a 6 core Phenom II but that would mean me having to re-authorize a lot of my software. I think, I'll wait until I fully upgrade my system before I go ahead and take the plunge. Of course by that time 8 core single dye cpus will be out. I think a 16 core system should be plenty fast, don't you? Then again, in '95 I thought that a 100MHz Pentium was smokin' fast. Then the GHz systems came out in 2000. It seems the faster the cpus get, the more demanding the software gets.

I'm still waiting for the DAW that will replace an operating system. A self contained DAW as an OS. Maybe based around the Windows 7 kernel but pared down to the absolute necessities. Installed as a single Solid State drive. True Plug and Play. Almost zero installation time. I can imagine the hardware compatibility would be limited but can you imagine the potential reliability?

I hope that someone in the programming world is listening.

MPC 60's were a dedicated PC and they were IMHO screaming fast. They could handle any speed, with fully programmed drums, samples, bass, 2 ins and 4 outs of midi running 10 keyboards, even doing System Exclusive dumps in real time. No latency that I ever recall.
That's the power of self contained OS. I mention this because the those high end drum sequencers were the beginning to the DAW. To me, DAW's are the more advanced sequencer and sampler systems. It worked so well back then and it was controlling both analog and digital plus SMPTE. Good things are coming.

A self contained DAW sounds like a beautiful thing. I personally would be happy to just have a program that ran seamlessly in a good Windows based environment (XP, 7). I usually record 16+ tracks simultaneously of audio with my band and can't wait until the day that I no longer here phasing through the headphones while tracking.

I was really hoping that Radar would evolve into this but it seems they got stuck in the hard drive recording. That's cool but it would be really nice to incorporate some of the newer plugins. I have had no issues with Windows 7 and DAWs. It's the most stable OS Microsoft has put out IMHO. I was ready to ditch MS altogether until Win 7 came out. I may stay.