As knup is now hosted on a new machine I changed my blog software. Now I’m using WordPress. It will take some time until all stuff from my old site will be available.
So stay tuned.
One nice thing about this change is, that I can write my posts now in TextMate. That’s a lot nicer than in these clunky embedded web browser editors.

I read much about the transition which focuses on difficulties for users in the future, but no article talks about the music stuff which won’t make the transition. There’s much software out which won’t get compiled for Intel processors as their companies went out of business, or won’t support their software anymore. Many VST Plugins which were ported from classic Mac OS to MacOSX are CFM plugins. CFM plugins will never work on Intel processors inside the host application. Audio applications won’t work in the Rosetta emulator and all plugins need to be compiled for Intel to work this way. So say good bye to Attack, PPG, GRM Tools, etc…
For us audio freaks it’s the second hard transition on the mac in less then 4 years. A big amount of plugs didn’t take the route to OS X, now there will be again many plugs which will never work on Intel based Macs, at least not inside the host process. One way to make them available may be to run a separate app which will run in Rosetta and use IPC (Inter process communication) to exchange the audio buffers. But this will degrade the performance if it works at all.
So what to do ? I think it will take at least another 3 to 4 years until music software has made the total switch to Macs with Intel processors and with many lost software. So if you want to use Macs for making music you should wait until your current machine is too slow for what you want to achieve and then buy the fastest PowerMac G5 you can get. This power should be enough for the next 3 years.
As a developer I don’t see any difficulties to get Software running on Intel based Macs, but as a musician I’m angry for this shift. Maybe I should build my next DAW on top of a Windows machine

There is a new Support Forum. If you want to have support for Multi Delay or any other software I have written, register and post your questions there. You can also post there if you want to make any other comment about this site.

After long inhouse speculation Yamaha officially announced today that they will buy Steinberg out of Pinnacle. What a nice day today. Pinnacle mostly sucks and I was thinking about leaving Steinberg because of them.Now I’m feeling lucky and christmas could be much better than ever. The most exciting thing I heard today was that even Apple was one of the bidders for Steinberg. That would suck. Not that I don’t like Apple but that would have a bad mood after they had bought Emagic. One other bidder was Avid. Boy am I happy that they also didn’t won the race. They would kill Nuendo.
I think Yamaha will be much more fair to us than all the other companies out there. I doubt that they won’t touch us but I think that they will give us much more than Pinnacle ever wanted. So I feel happy and I will drink some beer.

Our server was hacked last weekend and we had to clean it. That was my chance to update this blogging software. As I’m too lazy to port the old interface to this new version, I just modified the default skin.
No news on Multi Delay or anything like that. But it is working with Logic 7 without changing a line of code not like so many other plugs

that could happen if you don’t have to work, and your knee hurts so that you can’t walk. Fuck and this between Christmas and New Year. Hope this is over in a few days.

Not a funny day today until I read this thread on NI forums.
Thanks Levon.

Are AudioUnits the Mac way to develop Audio Plug-Ins ?
There is much talk about it on many forums (cubase.net, logicuser.net, osxaudio.com etc) and some developers talk about it also (here and here).
Some are praising Audio Units as the defacto standard for Mac OS X. But is it ? Is it the standard audio plugin format because Apple Computer Inc. said this ? This would mean that DXi is the standard on computers with the Windows operating system.
So DXi and AU are the audio plugin standards on todays most used operating systems. This would be the conclusion. But the fact is that VST is currently the standard. Why ? It is cross platform and it is old, much older than AU and DXi.
Yes this also means that the technologies used in VST are also older. This is why the mac developers rightly say that AU is superior (maybe the same is true for DXi, I don’t know). But does this mean that if you are a truly mac developer you have to go the AU way ? No. There is one thing not discussed yet. AudioUnits are a baby of Apple. Besides the untrue saga that AU is an open system, Apple can close it anytime if they want. Apple is mostly a hardware company not an audio company (yes they are good in copying technology, see Core Audio, Audio Units etc) but at first there is the hardware they want to sell and if there is no more need in Audio anymore they will discontinue it. So this is also true for every other plugin format out there, but DigiDesign and Steinberg are only interested in Audio so their plugin formats won’t go away until they go out of the audio business.
What we really need is an open audio plugin standard that is not controlled by one company. (there is something on the way, but nothing available in the next few years).