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