Leopard internals (or DP will have a major redesign)

[Frodo]

One of the first signs of change in the wake of all of the L8 price slashing and OSX upgrading has been a "virtual" price slash of DP. Almost everywhere I look, DP is selling for $499, same as Logic Studio.

So, by virtue of DP 5.13, DP is officially dabbling in Leopard: a step in a positive direction, imho, but more of a step in the direction of compatibility than competitive marketing in a sense.

To stay competitive one must indeed stay compatible, but where a full retail version of DP up to so recently had an average sale price in the mid $600's, DP was a lot of bang for the buck by comparison. Apple's price slash of Logic to $499 was quite enough to raise eyebrows. That Logic is now bundled in a suite of apps only ups the ante, as we've anticipated and have seen.

Certainly, anyone can make considered assessments of quality of each app-- but where DP's price now matches Logic's price, it's clear that sheer quantity of each bundle has become a more important factor than may have been anticipated.

Some have speculated that the price of Logic may or may not be an issue where DP's staying power is concerned, but where many merchants still post DP's official list price at $795, it makes one wonder just what inspired this recent re-pricing of DP if it weren't the price of Logic Studio.

Cubase 4 is floating around in the $800 range, about 20% its list of $1k. This makes me wonder if Steinberg is *not* feeling the Logic price pinch at all (or will feel it evenutally), if MOTU really *is* feeling the pinch, or if the Logic/DP price of $499 is either a coincidence or a necessity.

Some have wisely speculatied that Apple would only hurt itself by making it difficult or impossible for third-party developers to catch up with the myriad of changes currently in motion. Perhaps there's more truth to this beneath the surface. If DP going to $499 is a necessity, selling DP for cheaper is not going to make it any easier for MOTU to get their Cocoa team in motion. That Apple dropped the bomb on Carbon/64 frameworks hasn't helped much either.

To do all of this while being forced to sell a product for considerably less than Q1 projections may have dictated were possible at the time cannot possibly have rendered the most pleasant of circumstances where the goal posts have been conveniently moved mid-game-- and moved once again.

I believe MOTU *will* get it done. The final questions are "when" and "how". I guess I didn't expect to see DP going for $499 so soon if at all.

[Frodo]

...Unfortunately, there is no panacea, and as these issues with C++ vs. Objective-C vs. MAS vs. AU vs. 32-bits vs. 64-bits vs. Carbon vs. Cocoa show, it is nigh impossible for a vendor to pick a set of tools, programming languages, etc., for scaling long-term product growth and a framework of reusable components for tiering multiple products, without eventually being bitten by a surprise of some sort that throws the whole strategy into a mess.

I'm sorry to have snipped any part of your post, mh, because so much of it was quite edifying. I just ran across something on the VSL forum that may be quite complimentary to what you've said so eloquently. It came from one of the development team over there who appeared to be slightly exasperated with all the Mac-64 anxienty:

Regarding VSL--

sigh ... development happens basically in C++ and needs to be cross-platform.

Since Cocoa is more a framework than a system API one would need to adapt everything according to the rules of such a framework, in [which] case you can limit yourself to objectiveC (and possibly a few lines of C++ code to be inserted) Cocoa would be great assumably.

[If] you have an existing codebase and need to be cross platform i think every developer will confirm its not the first choice.

Clearly a little company like VSL cannot maintain an application.. for at least 8 tastes (XP, VISTA, 32 + 64 bit, PPC, intel 10.4 10,5, 32 and 64 bit) using 2 different IDEs (Integrated Development Environments)

I'm aware that DP itself is Mac-only. However, MOTU's non-bundled VIs are cross-platform. That leaves quite a task for MOTU to get their PC drivers up and running, then to get DP recoded, only to find that none of the non-bundled VIs will work.

Another thing to watch for is the fate of MAS itself where rebuilding a Cocoa/64 framework for could be more trouble than its worth. That's not to suggest that MAS will stop if/when DP goes to 64-bit, but it could very well be the end of MAS as we now know it. MASmk2 maybe?

But I wonder if Apple's doing away with Carbon-64 framework support won't force some smaller companies to throw in the towel...?

[Shooshie]

My guess is that they will begin with a transition in which MAS is supported, but not central to DP's operation. Then after a certain number of releases, MAS will finally go away. Meanwhile, they will have developed a way to have unlimited outputs and other things that MAS allows, using only Core Audio. MSI, Ethno, and MX4 will be adjusted accordingly. The fact that those three applications are cross-platform is extremely important to MOTU's strategy. They probably sell 5 or 10 times as many of those as they sell copies of Digital Performer. Those serve as a first introduction to MOTU products for many people, and as an introduction to Digital Performer, since DP plays a prominent role in their manuals. But more importantly, they FINANCE the development of DP. It looks to me as if MOTU's offerings all work together to keep the core product -- DP -- alive. At the same time, DP's user base also forms the core base for all their other offerings, since we do tend to buy MOTU products as an audio/music production family or bundle. It is essential for MOTU to get about $200/year from every DP customer, plus what they make selling cross-platform hardware and software. A million dollars will only pay for about 12 top-tier employees, and employees are only part of their expenses. Plus, the owners have to make a profit or it's not worth running the company. A slip-up in strategy could put them out of business. They don't have the excess cash to play with like Apple does. But it appears to me that they have their ducks in a row, and they are doing what they need to do. Still, DP is not getting the programming attention it needs, and that is evident in the product itself. No need for spies to see that!

The delay of MachFive2 almost certainly hurt them. Plus, it's not easy to use. Some things are ingenious, but other rather simple operations can be an exercise in frustration. The manual is poorly written: lots of references to other pages that don't really help the point much, and very few step-by-step "do X,Y, and Z before A, B, and C, if you want D" make MachFive2 slow to deliver on the promises made.

Ethno has probably helped. I hear nothing but good comments about Ethno, and people buy it who have never heard of MOTU. MSI likewise is good for them. It's one of the cheapest libraries out there, and it does an excellent job for its price range, and is very easy to use. It's also quite powerful in its ability to output to almost unlimited tracks (in MAS, anyway), and all the instruments make non-DP users salivate at the thought of having all those outputs. I'm sure at least a few new buyers of DP came from those who first bought MachFive, MSI or Ethno.

All that just to make the point that their product lines work together to enhance their earnings. MAS has been an important part of that, being the glue that holds the product line together with "sample accuracy." MOTU will have to devise a workaround if it needs to drop MAS (and I think that it does). Also, I think they are going to have to work on their advertised "sample accuracy," which at this point can only be considered valid with a big * and ** and ••  and a few footnotes explaining just what is sample-accurate and what is not. DP certainly doesn't place 3rd party plugins and VI's in their proper positions. If it did, there would be no need for Buffy! (It looks to me like that would not be so hard to do. Just monitor the scrolling cursor, vs. the return on the sounds of each track, and automatically insert the buffer required to make them all match up.) But as I said, DP is not getting the coding attention it deserves, or else all that attention is being focused on rewriting. I don't know which. (I hope it's the latter.)

The price of DP at Sweetwater was $499 the day that Apple announced Logic Pro's new price of $499. I don't know if that was changed for that purpose, or if that was simply the price for which DP had been selling, but it was definitely that price on that day, because I looked it up and posted about it in these pages. If MOTU is going to give us more value for $499, as Apple did with Logic Studio, it won't come from bundling MSI, Ethno, and MachFive2 with DP. That's obvious to me because of the strategy I outlined above, wherein those apps must bring in money from us -- the DP users -- to keep the company alive. Plus, their market share is being squeezed on their interfaces. Every company is now making audio and MIDI interfaces, and some sound quite good for the price.

I think they need to bring back Performer and make it multi-platform, or at least update it for Intel, and bundle it with every hardware box. Performer, in its final incarnation, was basically DP-Lite, because it included 4 tracks of audio. Instead of AudioDesk, which is maddeningly unlike DP, Performer could train people to use DP and to actually crave its unlimited power. It might bring in a lot of customers. It was foolish of them to drop it. As a bundled app, it would preach the joys of DP to everyone.

64 bit, Cocoa DP will arrive eventually, but I'd give it a year, minimum. I'm wrong if they've been working on it for the past several years, but MOTU can't move fast enough to rewrite DP from the ground up since the last WWDC where Steve dropped the Cocoa-64 bomb on Carbon apps. It will be like waiting for the original DP for OS X. I suspect that Digi won't move much faster, though. It's not a matter of money; it's a matter of the time it takes to code the apps. None of these companies would very likely hire extra programmers to do it, so they will all work at their normal speed. You will recall that Pro Tools 6.0 arrived in January, 2003, while DP 4.0 arrived only 4 months later. (May) This was after the Public Beta of DP back in October, 2000. Apple had made last-minute changes then, too.

Prognostication is a wasteful past-time. Whatever happens will happen at its own speed, and when it does, we'll adjust to whatever it is. Period. That's what's going to happen.

Shooshie

[mhschmieder]

Just for the record, MX4 is Mac-only, and other than for some excellent reviews in the UK press and a couple of esoteric US magazines, I don't think it has gotten the attention it deserves. The MX4 forum hardly sees any activity, compared even to Ethno and MSI (or Mach Five).

I think you may be right though about both MSI and Ethno helping bring in potential new customers for the higher-end MOTU products, in terms of brand recognition and probably especially for Mach Five as it can also be used to load both products and edit them in more detail.

[Frodo]

I'd forgotten that MX4 was not cross-platform. That alone could contribute to its functionality where it requires relatively low maintenance: MAS/AU (RTAS, I imagine), over, done.

Yes-- a year for DP-64 to appear and another year for it to mature into any usable reliability for pro projects.

Ah, 2010.

[Shooshie]

I never knew that MX4 was Mac-Only. I Guess that would account for why we see so little about it out there.


Shoosh

[SixStringGeek]

The biggest problem is that DP is written in C++ but there's no C++ support in Cocoa. Cocoa GUI has to be written in Objective-C, so start from scratch here.

This is not correct. The core should be left in C++. That realtime code is a bitch to get right. No way in hell anybody sane would undertake a rewrite unless there were major problems with the current engine. I don't think there are. In fact, most of the framework code Apple provides for doing AU's is in C++ because, while it is ugly and difficult, C++ does outperform Objective C and with audio, performance is key.

As to C++ vs Objective C - Apple provides Objective C++ which makes throwing an Objective C UI on top of a C++ program dead easy. Basically, you can mix C++ and Objective C in the same file. They coexist peacefully.

The key compatibiity work will be replacing old Carbon code with new Objective C code - and again this is mostly user interface.

[Frodo]

I never knew that MX4 was Mac-Only. I Guess that would account for why we see so little about it out there.


Shoosh

I wonder why this is? Could it be that what's available for PC simply competes too strongly? Is not a matter of synth shortages, but is the soft synth market so saturated that MX4 wouldn't generate the revenues on PC to make it worth putting out there cross-platform?

So what goes up directly against MX4 and it's $280 street price?

KickAxxe: $50
G Force: $99
Waldorf Softsynth 3-pak: $80
Ultimtae Sound Bank Synth Anthology: $140
Predator: $150
Nexsyn: $150
Applied Acoustics Ultra Analog: $180
Arturia Analog Factory/Jupiter8V 2: $200 ea
Korg Legacy $200
NI Massive: $200
NI Absynth4: $200
(Note: NI Komplete Synths is $400 and includes Massive, FM8, Pro-53 and Absynth)
IK Moog/Tron: $250 ea
NI Reaktor: $270
Reason 4 $400
Metasynth 4: $400
Virus PoCo: $400
McDSP Synthesizer One: $450

I'm sure I left lots of stuff off (unintentionally), but MX4 appears to fall in at the top of the lower price range. I guess the question is whether its features are price-comparable.

I certainly like the interface, but I just don't have a pressing need for virtual synths at the moment while drowning in sample world. I suppose if it were between MX4 and something else, I'd probably be quite tempted by plenty of the others, uncertain if MX4 would either be my first choice or whether it would even be a contender for a second module.

Tough call.

[SixStringGeek]

Maybe it's time to switch to QT.

Definitely not unless MOTU has plans to go cross platform. Otherwise, the cost will be much too high and will probably bankrupt the company.

I wouldn't even know how to advise MOTU at this point, as I'm not 100% confident of my own decisions moving forward (until they have more time to play out), but I would still harbour a guess that a more platform-neutral toolkit or framework might be a good move, if things have to be done more or less from scratch anyway.

The writing was on the wall in 1996 when Apple purchased NeXT. Clearly Objective C/NextStep were the keys to Apple's future. Objective C has remained unchanged as a language since its introduction in 1989 until just now - when Leopard introduced Objective C 2.0 which provides, among other things, garbage collection - thus eliminating a whole class of crashing bugs. Even so, Objective C 1.0 is still fully supported - its a compiler switch.

If you are a Mac developer and are not concerned with cross platform development (and DP is definitely not cross platform - nor should they try unless they have really deep pockets), then there is only one sane choice and that is Cocoa. It is the backbone upon which all of the rest of the Mac's user experience is built.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

...I just don't have a pressing need for virtual synths at the moment while drowning in sample world...

What I'm finding with my synths (and have been for many years now) is that I have so many sounds to choose from that I don't need to program sounds very often. But each synth has it's own character. I think of MX4 as the "hard edge" and Korg Legacy as "Stoner." V-Synth is the "genius" with the (hardware) PC2 as my "longhair" and the Proteus 2/Orch as my "high school players."

PSP's default is my "music store browser" and the X-Treme FX "card" is my "What the heck?"

As for the DP built-in VIs... I don't play with them much - maybe not at all.

[kelldammit]

my short list of synths to buy when i was shrinking my collection and replacing stuff with better stuff:
blue
mx-4
cube 2
dfhs
ivory
msi
mach5 v2
i have all of them, and one or two others...except for mach5 (too new still) and mx4...when i trialed mx4, i couldn't just register the demo and have had an ilok authorization sent. i'm not sure if they've changed this yet, but it's looking like they may have. the local store doesn't have it in stock, and i just hate having to order a box and wait for it...
it is a killer synth.

kell

[Frodo]

hey kell:

Your list includes a nice balance of samples and non samples.

Where analog synths come into play, I wouldn't mind having something close to the Oberheim OBX/Matrix stuff. Of course a Prophet would be nice-- but yet some of the analog "bundles" mix and match characteristics from various companies while others focus on one particular type of emu.

But that's one nice thinig about having M5 on the list (or some other soft sampler). In a pinch one can start a collection of analog synth samples if they're not into heavy programming.

[blue]

So what goes up directly against MX4 and it's $280 street price?

KickAxxe: $50
G Force: $99
Waldorf Softsynth 3-pak: $80
Ultimtae Sound Bank Synth Anthology: $140
Predator: $150
Nexsyn: $150
Applied Acoustics Ultra Analog: $180
Arturia Analog Factory/Jupiter8V 2: $200 ea
Korg Legacy $200
NI Massive: $200
NI Absynth4: $200
(Note: NI Komplete Synths is $400 and includes Massive, FM8, Pro-53 and Absynth)
IK Moog/Tron: $250 ea
NI Reaktor: $270
Reason 4 $400
Metasynth 4: $400
Virus PoCo: $400
McDSP Synthesizer One: $450

I'm sure I left lots of stuff off (unintentionally), but MX4 appears to fall in at the top of the lower price range. I guess the question is whether its features are price-comparable.

That is a short list, as you mentioned. I could think of a few more that compete pretty well. Also, some of the ones on the high end ••“Reason, in particular••“ probably shouldn't be on the list if price for features offered is the main point of comparison. All that aside, the list does seem to suggest that MX4 is priced a bit out of range for what it delivers. I tried the demo and I liked certain things about it, but I wouldn't pay $280 for it when I can get something like Blue, Massive or even Reaktor (the best deal of all) for less.

Like MLC said, though: Each synth has its own sonic character. I've yet to come across one that can do it all and I'm not sure that's even possible or desirable. That's what makes the high price tag for MX4 even more prohibitive. To get a wide range of sounds I need a wide range of different synths, and building a collection starts to get a little pricey.

[kelldammit]

hey kell:

Your list includes a nice balance of samples and non samples.

Where analog synths come into play, I wouldn't mind having something close to the Oberheim OBX/Matrix stuff. Of course a Prophet would be nice-- but yet some of the analog "bundles" mix and match characteristics from various companies while others focus on one particular type of emu.

But that's one nice thinig about having M5 on the list (or some other soft sampler). In a pinch one can start a collection of analog synth samples if they're not into heavy programming.

thanks, Frodo!
i was going for maximum capability from minimum plugs...blue and albino (not on the list, but one i just ended up having to have) pretty well cover the analog side of things for me and more, with cube to handle the additive. some stuff, like piano, drums, and the symphonic, i wanted as real as possible...hence the samples. a sampler's just never a bad thing to have, and it's primary purpose was for "found" sounds, and to take the place of my favorite ROMpler (luxonix ravity...they seem to have vanished) for more "generic" sounds.
the whole purpose was to ditch ni komplete2 and a bunch of other plugs for stuff that sounded better and did more; to get away from emulators and go for stuff that could emulate originals, but not be limited by the originals' limitations or character. plus, i just wanted to be away from NI. that said, i LOVED pro52...even though i don't have it anymore, it's been a longstanding favorite of mine always. compared to blue, though, it sounds pretty thin.
a couple of emulators have since caught my eye (the arturia prophet/cs80/jupiter8, and perhaps korg's m1), but i've tried to maintain some discipline, and not drown myself in the glut of plugs i'd had before...
i will concur with a previous opinion: as much as i like mx-4, the pricepoint is really pretty high comparitively. it can do a LOT though, and sounds great...so it's still a consideration.

kell

[Frodo]

... That's what makes the high price tag for MX4 even more prohibitive. To get a wide range of sounds I need a wide range of different synths, and building a collection starts to get a little pricey.

...i will concur with a previous opinion: as much as i like mx-4, the pricepoint is really pretty high comparitively. it can do a LOT though, and sounds great...so it's still a consideration....

Bingo, gents! With analog soft synths ranging from $50-400 (and with some out there for free!), it was my unconsidered opinion that agreed with what you both have concluded post facto. I wish I knew more about what MX4 actually did compared to what a ton of other similar VIs did, but for as much as I like it, $280 is "up there", especially since it's Mac-only.

It clearly goes way beyond making a good product, which MOTU has done with MX4. But someone once said that you can't win by "not losing". Breaking even may be acceptable, but it's not a "plus". If MX4 is worth the trouble, then every DAW user under the sun should be able of having a crack at it.

I almost dread bringing this up, but even where M5v2 took 2.5 years to appear, it almost seemed as if it wouldn't have mattered at that point if it ever appeared. Nice that it did, but the long wait wilted a lot of lillies in the process. It doesn't even matter if a person uses MachFive. If anyone caught wind of such a long wait, they may be entirely put off on the notion of getting MX4 or some other MOTU product without any sense of security that the product will be eagerly supported. Supported, yes. But I wouldn't call 2.5 years terribly eager.

But somehow, to my thinking as a well-made VI, MX4 is probably the most impressive overall of all of MOTU's VIs. MachFive is cool, but again-- that long wait more than a killjoy. I lost so much work waiting for it and eventually had to find other ways and means of keeping my productivity up.

I guess what I'm saying is that MX4 is in many ways an even quieter victim than other MOTU products may have been-- and undeservingly so.