Re: [MMM] Re: Agnula and SC... (and Absynth)

Joel wrote...

> Rick, get a Mac. At least plan on getting one. It's a good plan.
> A G4 of some sort - eMac, PowerBook, iMac, PowerMac.
> User-friendly desktop Unix super-computing. And with it's
> "CoreAudio", it's got music in it's soul. Reportedly it's dead
> easy to write audio & MIDI apps in OS X, including software synths.

Hmmm, well... I'm not going to personally get a Mac unless I win the
lottery or something. (I do have one here -- a G4 dual processor, hubba
hubba with a huge disk and memory. It's destined to be a web/project server
and move elsewhere.)

Some background info, as long as I'm talking, even though this is a bit
off-topic. (This platform business hits one of my hot buttons, so forgive
me if I'm ranting. You can skip down to the Absynth news.)

I was at NeXT for 7+ years followed by 3 years at Apple. My team
implemented pieces of the new Apple UI. Before that, my team did the NeXT
UI and Application Kit object framework pieces starting way way back in the
days of NextStep in 1990. I'm quite aware of of how cool the new Mac OS X
is, etc. I spent 10 years working on it! Until Mac OS X, all Apple OSes
sucked, pure and simple -- hideous to program, etc, they were stuck in the
1970s and never got "fixed" until NeXT came along and replaced the old Mac
OS with Mac OS X. Compared to the old NeXT OS, and now Mac OS X, everything
else still sucks as a development environment and a user environment both.
Mac OS X is great, and so is Objective-C. Just about any Unix box still
beats the hell out of Windows in terms of stability. (Even my brand-new
Windows XP box still has some of the same mysterious slow-downs and
inexplicable program-deaths and machine wig-outs that Windows has always
been famous for.)

I'm afraid that at this point, the software and hardware I want to run for
music making is cheaper and more ubiquitous on the PC platform, and having
a long investment in this stuff, I'm not going to switch platforms just to
run SuperCollider! ;-) There's always Infinity... or Reaktor... if I want
to go the toolbox route.

I think that if anyone is a serious developer and they want people to use
their software in the world and they want to make a difference, they would
be doing two things: (1) developing for deployment on the "majority"
platform (PC), and (2): bugging Apple to ship their kick-ass development
environment on the PC platform. (At one time, NeXT did ship on the Intel
platform... and even Apple once shipped a Developer version of the NeXT
software for Intel.)

That's my 2 cents.

Oh! Speaking of platforms. I found out today that Absynth, from Native
Instruments, has a shipping PC demo. Check it out! Cool synth! Has some
builtin tunings. I had earlier asked them this question:

> Are there plans to implement the MIDI tuning standard in
> Absynth? Any plans to make it possible for users to add their own scales
> with their own scales in files? In the next version maybe?

And today they wrote back to me and said:

> Yes, we might have it in 2.0.

Get yer lobbying in, friends!

Rick