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!

[jray]

Check out:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/technologies/audio.html

Here's a quote -

"Apple includes several Audio Units in Mac OS X, including a Velocity Engine-optimized reverb and a sample rate converter. Apple will release additional Audio Units in the future...Mac OS X includes a Velocity Engine-optimized Virtual Instrument compatible with the industry standard DownLoadable Sounds (DLS) format. The Mac synthesizer provides applications with high quality, low latency sample playback as well as control for filters and envelopes."

Finally - serious DLS support. This will be important for gaming and who knows...maybe it gives Virtual instrument makers a good leaping off point to make their own cheap samplers. If Core Audio's engine is as good as they say it is, why would you write your own? [read the part about M-Audio finding latencies of only 1 ms] It then becomes an issue of tools and feature sets. I know it's not as simple as all that (you still have to know Core Audio well enough to get this kind of performance) but it's only a matter of time before there are just gobs of cheap choices for audio developers.