Day 952--still No Pro Sequencer For Os X, Deliver us, O ye audio/MIDI gods... Options

[Levon River]

Even Noah only had to deal with 40 days and 40 nights of rain. Here we've been subjected to a 952-day and 952-night drought with NO, zip, none, nada, nary a single pro combined audio/MIDI program in sight.

Don't point to Reason 2.0: it's a wonderful program, but they admit that they don't even use *actual* MIDI, and I'd rather juggle kittens than use Reason's editors for writing and/or tweaking a part. And of course it doesn't do audio editing at all.

Don't point to Deck 3.5: no MIDI sequencing and editing.

No, it's a plague and a curse on Mac musicians, a starvation diet, over two years in solitary confinement. But there are promises...

Promises, promises...

DAY 952 and counting...

[ryosode]

I agree with Levon River. Live is not a Audio/MIDI sequencer and we all know (and if you don't, maybe you are on a wrong forum) that's not what we are looking for. Same goes for Reason and Deck. They are all great in their own rights.

Both Steinberg and MOTU said they'll release the production systems by the end of this year. Well, you know that when these companies aren't giving you specific dates, chance is shipments won't happen in next month or two. (Yeah, I heard the thing about "September release" too, but that was 6 months ago and nothing was heard afterwards.) As for Apple/Emagic, they haven't made any public statements as to when Logic will be available. Same goes for Digidesign.

For one thing, since Apple is pushing CoreAudio and that's what most developers are using, the old code must be changed dramatically. It's not making the pretty GUI that takes the most time. It's making sure the audio engine works fine that takes the longest. If you have ever looked at the source code for those audio stuff, you know how scary it is to rewrite the Audio I/O, right?

Secondly, Apple revised Audio HAL and MIDI Services in Jaguar. As the result, the API improved alot. However, some of the older API's were deprecated as well. While they have gone through extensive CoreAduio/MIDI Service sessions in the last WWDC 2002 (and you could pretty much meet engineers from every major companies discussed in these threads! They are working very hard.), it will take some time for the developers to catch up and rewrite the code that was written for 10.1.x. I am glad though that these developers are taking time to make sure the software works! In the mean time, I am content with my OS 9.

BTW, I noticed some ppl were spitting out jargon such as "CoreMIDI". I was not aware of an API called CoreMIDI. Pls correct me if I am wrong. Please read this page for general info on OS X Audio:
http://developer.apple.com/audio/coreaudio.html