Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

This article is conflating consumer audio and pro audio. Most of the points made in this article != pro audio concerns. I DO NOT CARE that the 1/8" jack is missing from the new iPhone and that has nothing to do with pro audio. I never looked to apple to make studio reference headphones and if I ever used them, it would be to check a mix to make sure that the music sounded ok with the typical users headphones.

Ive used various mac/windows based music platforms over the years since around 1997 and still think Mac is the better platform for audio. Heres why: 1) ios/osx has a baked in low latency audio framework in Core Audio which means even on board audio can run at < 10ms round trip latency 2) Logic is still the most solid DAW Ive ever used 3) Windows has yet to offer a compelling Audio experience with out serious hardware.

I will agree that the new mac pro was a big step backwards from the previous version. I had an 8 core mac pro from 2008 and that was the perfect music pc. Im sure the new one is fine, but I dont care about the aesthetics of the computer as long as I can depend on it to record a session and not fail.

The Native Instruments issues dont really surprise me and in my experience with that company their software quality ranges from buggy to mediocre (Komplete 1-8) to the point were I could not find a compelling reason to continue using their software. I could certainly understand a company acting defensive and blaming the OS manufacturer when they are flooded with bug reports.

To that I would also offer a counterpoints of Propellerheads Reason. Their software is consistently bug free and solid performing. So it does not seem to really be a "Mac" problem. I currently use a universal audio apollo 8 and that also performs solidly via the lightning interface at near real time latency. Point being, its possible to make solid software for mac.

Anyway, I don't think that the mac is perfect for audio, and the situation may be worse for video, it sounds like the new mac pro is a dud for pro users, which is disappointing.

As a semi-pro I tend to disagree with your reasons why Mac is better because 1) Tons of USB 3.0 audio interfaces work with Windows plug & play with <10ms latency (Focusrite comes to mind, Sweetwater lists a ton) that can be paired with any reasonable spec Windows laptop to be just as good and probably for less money [a], 2) Ableton Live and/or Reaper have been extremely solid in ways that yes Logic & ProTools also are solid, but this is a tie to me, and 3) Serious hardware goes back to #1 in that Windows actually has plenty of options that, let's be honest, a real serious Mac-based musician would invest in anyway. The gold standard UAD used to be Mac only but it's on USB 3.0 now so that kind of evens the field.

I grew up with Macs, but when I learned how to manipulate PCs and, to the best of my ability, overcome a lot of the inherent issues. A lot has been budget oriented. VSTs and the like don't run on Mac, that cuts off an entire community!

[a] Also there's ASIO4ALL which runs on a high grade machine pretty dang well - not Core Audio perfect, but it's surprisingly good in my experieince. Just needs like an i5, 8GB RAM and a decent HD (works great with SSDs).

I dont think that contradicts my point. My point was that core audio will let your built in sound card run sub 10ms. To do that with windows, you could use ASIO4All, and I think it is a generally good solution. However, its a bolt on, and not part of the windows audio subsystem. I ran windows 7 on my mac pro and used a card with WASAPI enabled drivers and they still couldnt perform as well as the native ASIO driver(which is itself a bolt on to get around crappy Windows audio performance) Its not impossible, and PLENTY of people use windows for audio but saying that out of the box it performs as well as osx is disingenuous at best. USB 3.0 is only just now becoming available while lightning has been available for a while.

Also, Mac runs/supports VST just fine, and having coded in both VST and AU APIs they are similar enough to make porting to either platform relatively trivial(though not fool proof).

Ah well I guess I'm off on the VST thing - hadn't been available at the time, still late XP early Win7 at the latest maybe?

Honestly though using the guitar approach that I was favoring, even having native audio drivers wasn't my ideal "sound chain" approach - personally speaking - so I was pretty much destined to use an outside interface for modeling and whatnot, among other approaches. I wasn't an "out of the box" kind of person but understand why Mac has that particular advantage, but for my not-genuinely-pro under-the-hood level I could still tell PC had equal footing to do powerful things that are more defined by the skill of the user than the inherent capabilities or quality of the platform. Basically a wash, thus not really a Mac advantage except in a kind of narrow defined view, a good one though.

>Logic is still the most solid DAW Ive ever used

ProTools? its pretty much the industry standard and it also supports your point that its unlikely to be the OS at fault - since most studios i've been in are running mac pros and protools without any issues.

Though protools requires some external hardware iirc

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