Audiounits, the beginning of the end! Options

[damann]

I love X so much these days, 9.2 already seems ancient.
CoreAudio and CoreMidi seem to have genuinely provided an
inspiring future for developers, Emagic, Steinberg, in fact, apparently
every developer on our wish list!
I've heard recently that CoreAudio has a native plugin framework that
seiously out-runs ASIO or any of the 3rd party stuff by Digi, Motu etc.
AudioUnits: a direct replacement, with 1ms latency reported, already implemented by Emagic, 100% cocoa, a potential industry standard in the making!
i've already backed up my 4.8.1 logic folder to CD, DVD, AND firewire drive 'cos i just know that VST etc are ultimately doomed.

this experience, although slow, will be the equivalent of completely replacing a studio and it's equipment in order to stay current.
of course there are carbon versions of a lot of the best plugins around
but this is more a question of support from OS & developers for VST etc!

I'd been hopeful and sceptical about Audio Units until, well, about five minutes ago. I'd thought that Logic was the only currently available host for AU (and, as my ISP nightmare continues, haven't been able to download the Audio SDK and build a testing app even to pursue my curiousity on this front). I found a nice little freeware app out there, Synthtest. It's just an app that lets you test out AU - both of the instrument variety and the DSP variety. (There are a few out there; www.osxaudio.com seems to be a reasonable reesource).

Anyway, using this nice little AU host has been thrilling. Latency is so minimal as to be imperceptible. And playing around with the Airy Synth AU (AUi? iAU? AUnstrument? someone coin something) was quite satisfying.

I've tons to learn before I could so much as program my way out of a code sample, but I'm lookin forward to learning. And AUs definitely seem the way forward from that perspective.