[sdiy] OT ? Favorite Software Synths

[Jason Proctor]

#pragma feeble excuse: i posted that message at 6.47am, long before 
my usual getting up time...

>Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I take it you don't like
>Apple and/or Macs for some reason?

well that's a long story. i've been mainly Mac for almost 20 years 
and in common with a lot of the community i have a great deal of 
affection for the Mac and an equal amount of frustration with Apple. 
not content with repeatedly attempting to drive themselves out of 
business between 1986 and 1997, they then sold out to NeXT, a company 
with no shrinkwrap software development expertise whatsoever, 
butchered their own carefully honed user interface, and are even now 
trying to compete with Microsoft in the competition to create slow 
buggy bloatware.

but i can forgive Apple for marketroid bugs like the Unix thing. the 
fact is that to almost everyone OS X *is* a Unix machine, and the 
subtleties of the situation would be beyond 99% of the target market.

>Should there be?  I mean, yeah, it would be great if we could write
>one program that ran on all platforms, but who's to decide which API
>is the one to use?  Personally, I've worked on Windows, OS X and Linux
>audio drivers, and I like OS X the best myself...

oh no, you misunderstand me. the original post claimed that porting 
OS X software to FreeBSD/Linux (themselves *very* different 
environments, incidentally) would be straightforward because they 
share a similar programming environment.

the intention of my post was to indicate that the pieces that X has 
in common with FreeBSD and/or Linux are no use for making an audio 
app. the audio and MIDI APIs are totally different. and i didn't even 
mention all the user interface stuff - neither Carbon nor Cocoa will 
work on Linux.

>Doug (That and $3.50 will buy you a small latte...)  ;-)

maybe in your neck of the woods :-)

ps i managed to get to DS2004 and it was mindblowing...