Tidwells@aol.com wrote: ↑Sun May 23, 2021 6:19 pm
Here is my take on it: I've been a Performer/DP user for over 30 years, I think. Years ago I started noticing that the Full-Page ads MOTU purchased on the back cover of Keyboard and Electronic Musician Magazine every month were almost always advertising their latest hardware products, NOT the latest upgrade of DP. Maybe one or two ads out of the 12 each year would be about DP. I believe that MOTU made a strategic business decision years ago to focus on hardware product development. Hardware can't be pirated like software. It was probably a smart decision and is probably why MOTU has survived so long. As a consequence, DP has survived all these years.
I think the real reason for priority change was OS X, and Logics acquisition by Apple. It took MOTU a while to get DP ported from OS 9 to x, and in the mean time Apple had inadvertently shoved a big wrench into DPs position as the premier Mac only DAW, this right after the downfall of Studio Vision. MOTU already had a thriving hardware business, and a sea change in how DP was seen by the general audience of it's at that time only OS platform.
I recall seeing how this affected DP in terms of the general population, at least people I knew and crowds I was around. Previous to OS X, DP was in the top 4: Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic, DP. Then it just dropped out of the scene. Not completely, but by the time the dust had settled, Ableton Live was in the top 4, and DP was on the way out. Partially because PPC chips were getting skunked by Centrino and Windows, but Logic was now super solid on OS X, so the general audience for DAWs was changing to the PC crowd, and the DAWs on PC.
The harsh reality, in my opinion, is that DP may have never been MOTU's top priority, or at least hasn't been for many years. Right now, there are 28 different audio interfaces advertised on MOTU's website, plus 4 MIDI interfaces and 3 video interfaces. And 1 DAW... And yet, even though it's not their top priority, I've enjoyed using DP and sticking with the same DAW for 30 years. I'm now more skillful in using it than ever. But DP's pace of updates and bug fixes has always been frustratingly slow. I suspect they usually let other DAW makers innovate and then copy popular features for DP. It's the "me, too" innovation philosophy. It worried me when MOTU stopped the full-page ads and I wondered if they were on the brink of going out of business. But I think that was 5 or 6 years ago and they are still here.
I don't know? I think it's hard to truly judge. We can compare the development teams of DAWs and of course it looks like some are bigger, but reality seems to be that most teams are about 2-6 people at any given point. So the real deal is probably more complex, for certain Apple will use the Logic team for other audio related things, and MOTU will use the software developers for their hardware, but there are other things to take into consideration. The older the software the harder it will be to jump through all the hoops that new changes in Mac OS introduce, along with changes in the things that people expect from a DAW.
MOTU definitely need to think about prioritizing DP for a while though, their iOS apps for their hardware are all working, DP Control has been DOA on new iOS devices for years. DP did come out with Clips before Logic did, there's good bones in DP, it just needs a new version soon with something to address up and comers that are taking some of it's base, like Studio One.
Also, there's a sort of weird graveyard on MOTU's site these days. Audio Desk is still listed even though it hasn't been updated since 2014, and it's completely replaced by Performer Lite. Pretty much the rest of their line up is depreciated. MachFive and the rest were pretty obviously collaborations with UVI, with whom they don't work directly with anymore. Falcon a long time ago replaced M53, and the rest of the instruments IMO are also based on UVI libraries, and haven't had updates in years, also all around 2014.
Then there's Apple Silicon, I often use another DAW for electronic music, Bitwig, they're relatively new but they tied their interface to OpenGL, which has beed depreciated on Mac OS for three years or so and probably won't work at all on Apple silicon natively.
M2 Studio Ultra, RME Babyface FS, Slate Raven Mti2, NI SL88 MKII, Linnstrument, MPC Live II, Launchpad MK3. Hundreds of plug ins.