[Les Cargill[_4_]]

Scott Dorsey wrote:
geoff wrote:
On 26/04/2019 11:12 PM, Bill wrote:

He still seems besotted with the Mac - he keeps referring to one
publisher who has encouraged the move - in spite of my questions of "why?".

The expression is "hook, line, and sinker". He now feels superior to the
plebes. A bit like an Audi driver, or a vegan. It will keep cropping up
early in any conversation that he is involved in now.

The nice thing about the mac is that it has a decent command line and you
can do everything you need to do from the command line. Which, given their
history, is kind of ironic.

Windows is starting to get there with Powershell, but controlling ProTools
from Powershell is not going to be a pleasant experience.


I've added a Tcl interpreter to every computer I've had since the mid
1990s. There are also all the usual Unix tools - - ls, grep etc -
ported to Windows available for free.

It's really nice to be able to script things and do bulk conversion of files
on OSX. Computers are supposed to do repetitive tasks for you, not force
you to do them yourself.

Linux would have been nice, and there are Linux dialects with pseudo-realtime
hooks in the kernel that could have made for a nice audio platform, but really
pulseaudio is a disaster. I'm still hoping for someone to develop decent
low-level audio support for linux and I'm hoping it happens before the Red
Hat people manage to destroy everything with integrated bloat.


As much of a horror show as the API is, Windows has had multimedia API
support forever. I recall notifications for a meeting where the Linux
folk were still trying to figure out what an event in multimedia was.
This not long after 2000.

If they ain't got it in 28 years...

So I kind of think of OSX as a nice compromise... it's a unix-like system
with a decent shell, but with good audio support.

And yes, Apple's obsession with chasing the latest flashy new thing is a
problem, but for a DAW you can just get a system and freeze it. Until a
couple years ago I still had a first generation Sonic workstation for CD
mastering. It was in the studio for 26 years, then it went straight from
the studio to a museum.

Apple has apparently started gluing cases together.

--scott


--
Les Cargill