[sdiy] Another new hard to find part....

[Richard Wentk]

At 17:35 07/07/2004 +0200, Ingo Debus wrote:

>Am Dienstag, 06.07.04 um 19:08 Uhr schrieb Richard Wentk:
>
>>And if you code a softsynth on a standard PC/Mac, planned obsolescence is 
>>much less of an issue.
>
>I doubt that. How long does it take until a chip becomes obsolete, perhaps 
>ten years or even more?
>Do you think any of today's soft synths as they are now will run on 
>up-to-date computer hardware in ten years?

I'm still running s/ware from ten years ago. So very possibly. And people 
are running emulators of much older machines, and doing it successfully. 
Meanwhile all the successful 64-bit processors run 32-bit code with ease. 
Itanium's VLIW approach hasn't taken off, and shows no signs of making any 
headway at all in the mainstream PC market. What this means in practice is 
that I think we're guaranteed at least another decade of x86 compatibility.

In any case, I think it's more likely that products will be continually 
updated and consolidated, so if the underlying hardware or OS changes, 
updates will become available. This model has been working on both Mac and 
PC for at least ten years now, and many products have survived major 
upgrades. Where products have disappeared - like the original Digidesign 
Softsynth - they've always been replaced by a wider selection of 
alternatives, often of better quality.

Meanwhile if there were a DIY open source softsynth - something like Csound 
but with a more intelligent internal design and better interface - a 
project like that would run and run. Csound is already 25+ years old.

Richard