ORIGINAL: Roflcopter

In the US, Logic Pro 7 is less than half of the 1000 euros you are claiming it costs,

I took the list price off their website - so that's not my 'claim'.

Furthermore, such a port would take resources and money, which has to be recovered, wouldn't you think? Making only Apple users pay more for a ported version would be pretty unusual, companies usually keep their cross-platform products more or less evenly priced IMO. So, in my view that wouldl mean the only way is up, price-wise.

Don't see what's so 'strange' about that at all.

No. Before you were saying that Cakewalk would raise the price of Sonar to match the price of Logic.
Since Cubase and Digital Performer don't do that, there's no reason to expect Sonar would. And Sonar
could not sustain a price that high. If it could, it would already be selling its Windows version for that
price.

Now you're saying something different. Now you are saying that Cakewalk would ask its customers to
subsidize a Mac port of Sonar by raising the price of Sonar (for both Windows and Mac). That would
never happen. If the Mac sales did not support the development cost of the port, Cakewalk would not
do the port. If the company was short on the money needed for the port, but felt the port was a
good investment, it's still very unlikely they'd raise the price of Sonar. They'd much more likely do
what most businesses do when they want to make an investment. They raise capital by going to
a bank, or investors, or selling stock in the company, or whatever.

They'd much more likely do what most businesses do when they want to make an investment. They raise capital by going to
a bank, or investors, or selling stock in the company, or whatever.

I wouldn't see investors being too likely. Venture capital doesn't invest in things like that. They invest in large, breaking markets where they can get a huge enough ROI to make up for the 20 other failures that they have for each winner. And, personally, if it was my company, I'd not be willing to give up any equity to raise money for such a thing unless there was going to be a considerably payoff, which I just don't believe is going to happen, for the reasons already given.

And I also agree that there's not much technical advantage anymore to being on the Mac. For that matter, the increased stability of the Mac was always a bit overstated. I've read many books on the history of my industry, and a lot of them cover Apple, because it was such a tale of Shakespearean tragedy. In all cases, they indicated that the Mac of the Win95/98 era wasn't a lot more stable. These days of course I'm sure it's infinitely better, but so XP is also very stable and capable now as well.

So it still comes down to would they increase their revenues enough to justify doing it, and I just can't see how it would come remotely close.

ORIGINAL: BruceEnnis

Actually, this discussion has veered far off where I wanted it to go. My only interest in Sonar for Mac is to make it easier for me to access projects I wrote before I switched to Mac.

Back on topic I'll be installing Parallels with a copy of XP Pro later this morning. My intention is to install Sonar and P5 I know they won't work with my main audio system Protools HD2 but I'll consider it a success if they run with the internal sound card on my Mac Pro. Just like yourself I have years of projects developed using Cakewalk products like Pro Audio and Sonar since it was released. I'm also going to examine other tools such as CD/DVD Architect from Sony and if time permits Vegas Video.

I'll post my results later in the day and thanks to Morelli your post provided the motivation to finally run the tests for myself.

Cool, thanks Bruce.
I'm bootcamping as we speak, since I just ditched my iMac for a Macbook for the portability of it. Hopefully, it will allow me to also get rid of my brick of a Dell 17" that I NEVER take mobile due to it's utter size (what was I thinking?).

FWIW, I'll post my stuff too... Project5 & Sonar 6PE, using the built-in sound card (I'm a little worried about this one, and hoping the ASIO4FREE/ASIO4ALL drivers will work with it. We'll see.

Take care,
- zevo

ORIGINAL: BruceEnnis

Well I’ve been testing most of the day initial thoughts on Parallels are it’s ok for standard software packages. When it comes to audio tools like Sonar and P5 it starts to show its flaws. The most annoying was regardless of driver capabilities I was forced to use MME. Another big deficit was no Firewire support this rules out all of the better audio interfaces. Next on my list would be the limitation of only 2 USB devices in use at any given time Parallels lists all of USB devices but only 2 can be active at a time. On a positive note I did install the Frontier Design Transport in Sonar worked like a charm.

Overall I found editing in Sonar 6 is working about the same as my AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4800+. However I would not attempt to record using Parallels due to it high latency. As for P5 v2 everything was looking good until I installed the upgrade it’s now failing during startup due to Audio card driver errors.

This is obviously a work in progress I’ll continue to install my windows applications and see just how everything turns out.

That is pretty cool. Do all the VSt's and plug ins work like normal too? So the only down side is the high latency using mme? I can live with that to just mix and record into a different app.


But this gives me a bright idea and a question;
Cakewalk should get together with Parallels and iron out the kinks. That would seem to resolve the issue of porting over and it should be way cheaper that a full port or a new app. Then Sonar would be mac compatible with minimal fuss! It's seems like with Parallels; it's almost there!

ORIGINAL: BruceEnnis

Overall I found editing in Sonar 6 is working about the same as my AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4800+. However I would not attempt to record using Parallels due to it high latency. As for P5 v2 everything was looking good until I installed the upgrade it’s now failing during startup due to Audio card driver errors.

OK, this is wonderful news. This confirms what I've heard but haven't been able to verify before. I don't care about recording, because I
don't foresee initiating any new projects in Sonar. This is just to facilitate the conversion of my existing Sonar projects to Logic. On the other hand,
I have heard that people have been able to use Sonar for recording, with the proviso that you can't share interfaces with OS X apps. But
people have very different sensitivity to latency.

By the way, which version of Parallels are you using? Is it the new version 3?

ORIGINAL: morelli


Well, I don't think that's going to happen. Very few people would be buying Sonar to run under Parallels.
Personally, I don't see anything so compelling about Sonar that people would want to do that, when there
are at least 3 leading native sequencers available. This would mostly be a transitional tool to help people
converting to native Mac sequencers. I can't see any rationale for Cakewalk facilitating that.

If you really want to see the Windows Sonar running under OS X, I suggest you check out the Codeweavers
Crossover Mac product. That product essentially turns a Windows app into a Mac app, by implementing the
Windows API under OS X. Once Codeweavers implements everything Sonar uses from the Windows API,
Sonar becomes essentially a Mac app. That would be a better solution than running Sonar inside a VM.
The goal is that one day they finish implementing all of the Windows API, so every Windows app
would become a Mac and a Linux app. They still have a lot to do, but they have enough done
that Office for Windows runs correctly on Mac and Linux.

So if you care enough about this, make a pledge to Code weavers on behalf of Sonar. If they get enough
pledges, they could decide to prioritize the APIs that Sonar uses, so Sonar starts running sooner.

As for myself, I don't really care about having Sonar on Mac, apart from converting my projects to Logic,
which apparently I can already do with Parallels.

It's conceivable, though unlikely, that Cakewalk would assist Codeweavers in getting Sonar fully
supported by Crossover. In principle, they'd then have a Mac and a Linux version of Sonar for practically
no work. In practice, I would expect few Mac and Linux users would become new Sonar users.

Very, very interesting. Codeweavers sounds even better. The only real reason I would want to use Sonar on a mac (OS that is) is because I don't want to shell out another grand for logic or $500 or so for DP or the other sequencer. And dual booting into bootcamp is a work around, but...not very elegant. Plus having to repurchase my non mac plug ins or programs. And I really like Sonar, even though they all do the same thing pretty much now. I'm used to Sonar and there are some features I really like.
I guess it would be easy enough to dual boot into bootcamp. That would only be the cost of bootcamp and xp.


But still...Why can't Cakewalk get toghether with Codeweavers and make this happen? Why not run on the OS that most pros use?

Seems to me like the perfect solution from Cakewalks cost and effort POV.

By the way, which version of Parallels are you using? Is it the new version 3?

Yes I downloaded the Trial version of 3 and installed an existing version of Win XP Pro I had here at the house. Actually I was very surprised that when I registered XP on the Mac it did so without any complaints.

Overall I found editing in Sonar 6 is working about the same as my AMD ATHLON 64 X2 4800+.

Bruce,
Is this on your macbook?

Is this on your macbook?

I ran these tests on my Mac Pro specs are below:

3.00 GHz Quad Xeon
4GB 667 DDR2 FB DIMM ECC-4x1GB
2x NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB
2x 19" NEC LCD92VX-BK Monitors
4x 500GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s drive
16x SuperDrive DL (DVD+R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
3x PCI Express
10/100/1000 BASE-T
Airprt Extrm & BT 2.0+EDR
5x USB 2.0
2x USB 1.1 on keyboard
2x Firewire 400
2x Firewire 800
Audio
Mac OS X 10.4.10

Digidesign HD 2
Magma PCIe into 13 Slot PCI chassis with 4x UAD-1 cards

I don't know
exactly what the ratio is between Windows and Mac for music, but it's not 10 to 1. I've been taking it for granted
that you realized this.

ahhh...don't make that assumption here in windows land...save your energy on this one bro...SONAR is a confirmed Windows product, for better or for worse.

ORIGINAL: morelli
Actually, from my point of view, it's not so much about needing a
business justification for making a Mac version of something, as it is about needing a good business justification for
not making one. I don't know whether Cakewalk has such a justification. That's their business. But I don't think you know
either.

SONAR is a windows app, from the ground up. To port SONAR to OS X would require a rewrite, of at least the GUI framework, from the ground. Unless platform abstractions are in place from day 1, even separating the "GUI" from the "engine" of a windows app is... well, a windows app is a windows app, and we'll leave it at that. Even down at the core audio engine level, you're talking about managing threads and queues and memory buffers and device interface abstractions in very windows-specific manners. On top of that you have the requirement to run in realtime with very specific tolerences for how long certain tasks should take, priorities of GUI activity over audio engine activity, optimizing CPU and disk overhead, minimizing blocking/thrashing due to synchronization, etc. This is fundamentally different than how a spreadsheet or a vector graphics application works, which just sit there staring back at you..

A Mac port would require decomposing the app into the very windows-specific stuff and the somewhat windows-specific stuff, replacing the somewhat windows-specific stuff with cross-platform frameworks, introducing platform abstractions, etc., etc.... you're looking at rewriting the app.

So the question isn't "is there a business justification for running on mac?"... the question is "how much is the business willing to spend to make it happen?". Keep in mind you're starting with a fixed set of windows programmers, sales/marketing resources, capital investment in hardware and floor space for development and testing, fixed size beta test team, etc. --- let's add all that up and call it "X". If you want to develop for a totally new OS, then you need shell out to support "2X" -- you need twice as many programmers and testers (roughly), twice the beta team size, twice as many managers (to manage twice as many resources), twice the floor space to fit all those additional seats and desks, etc. For a company the size of cakewalk (on the order of $10 mil annual revenue), doubling your overhead is a tremendous commitment. For a company with annual revenue $100 mil, maybe it's not such a big deal.

I'm sure cakewalk product development has been aware for years of the role that Mac plays in the music market -- and they've concluded that making up for what they lose in the Mac market is simply not worth the additional exorbitant costs of doing parallel product development. I'm sue they'd like to support Mac to get as many customers as possible (and what company wouldn't want that), but the cost is too high.

Perhaps with OS X being light years beyond what MacOS ever was they're in the process of revisiting those conclusions... I would not rule out a OS X port, but with the embracing of Vista it certainly looks unlikely at this juncture. Personally, I didn't agree with reprioritizing to support Mac, but increasingly I would actually prefer to have the option! If MS keeps going on this "entertainment PC" thing, then I'm a little afraid of where the PC OS world is going to be 8 years from now...

ORIGINAL: eikelbijter

It always blows me away how much people care about an OS. To me it makes so little difference, I care about the actual application I'm running! Once I'm in Sonar the OS doesn't really matter anymore, does it? Now, if I can get fast hardware, that I can fix/upgrade myself, with a stable OS (XP is as stable as OS's get), in ANY kind of case, for less money, why in the world would I buy a MAC? Or why would I care about Vista for that matter? I think the world is really in trouble with its obsession with form.....

Rico

Why not buy clothes from walmart then? Or just use Beringer gear. They do the same thing and get the job done right?

Who cares why someone wants a mac. Most of the arguments against macs involve "PC's are cheaper". Sometimes, people want the luxury. Once I sign my 7 million dollar deal, you can bet I won't be monkeying around with PC's anymore.

You sell some kind of Windows software and you're under the impression that 92 percent of buyers are running Windows.
Well, maybe 92 percent of spreadsheet users are using Windows, and maybe 92 percent of users of your kind of software are using
Windows, but it's certainly not true that 92 percent of music software users are running Windows. That would mean more than 10 times as many people doing music on Windows than Mac, which is not in agreement with my experience.

And it's not about what percentage of people are using what OS in my kind of software. It's that, as I've said now 3 times at least, when the product is one like my kind of software (home automation) or a DAW like SONAR, where it is likely to be the overwhelming if not total purpose of the machine it's on, the OS makes a lot less difference that the software. And since almost every single person will have experience with Windows, even if they prefer the Mac, the barrier of acceptance is even lower.

So the question is, if we put in X amount of effort to make the product cross platform, what does it buy us? The answer is likely to be not enough to justify it. If someone things that SONAR is really the DAW software that offers them what they want, the fact that it's Windows only probably isn't a huge barrier, so best case, you are only going to increase your market by the number of people who wouldn't have come over otherwise and who wouldn't use use some other product on the Mac anyway.

This just makes it a hard sell to justify putting in the huge effort. If they'd started from day one with a desire to be cross platform, and had spent all these years building up the product with that in mind, it would be a much different story. If it was *easy*, then pretty much any amount of additional revenues would make it worth it. But that doesn't seem to be the case, and the work required to get it there at this point would be huge, and would probably bring the product almost to a stop for a major release period because the complexity of a large rewrite at the same time as the mainline product moves forward would be a serious technical and managerial struggle.

If you are a product primarily selling on the Mac side or starting on the Mac side, the yes it does make a difference. Because now the number of new potential customers is the number of people who would have come from the Windows side and who wouldn't use some other Windows based product if yours was available. The barrier is a lot higher because all those Windows people probably have zero exposure to the Mac. So it would be a much bigger stretch for them to move over, so getting your product onto the Windows platform could make a big difference for you. And probably you were forced long ago to consider this problem and start working towards a portable solution, since the Mac's market percentage hit it's current low point over ten years ago, right?

They could probably do it in slow incremental steps, over a few years, by slowly changing the underlying architecture in a way that we don't see, slowly adding abstractions for all the system services. But I've done that and it's a big job. I spent over 12 years building ours, and it would still be quite a compromise to do a heavily GUI oriented multi-platform product. A server side product wouldn't be much trouble. But SONAR is fairly heavily GUI based, and probably has quite a few hooks into lower level OS services in order to maintain performance, and that would probably make for porting difficulties as well.

Anyway, I don't see the business justification for it at this point. The new business doesn't seem likely to be worth the cost and effort required.

ORIGINAL: morelli
3. Does anyone know how well Sonar runs in the new version of Parallels (version 3)?
I've heard that it runs well, but you might need to have two midi interfaces if you want
to run a native OS X sequencer at the same time because you can't share USB devices.
Anyway, don't take my word for it, I have no direct experience. I'd appreciate hearing
from anyone running Sonar inside Parallels.

Sorry I'm late to the discussion...

One or two others in this thread have already made some of these observations, but here goes:

Overall, I've been quite impressed with my ability to run SONAR inside Parallels on a MacBook Pro. As a virtual machine, Parallels has turned out to be quite efficient, with certain limitations. For one, I had to install ASIO4ALL to get reliable performance from the virtual sound card driver... but I can now access my MacBook Pro's internal sound card for playback *and* recording, and if I assign Mac playback to an Mbox 2 inside OSX, then I hear SONAR through that as well. I only recently updated Parallels to version 3, and I haven't tried using the Mbox 2 directly as a USB device within Parallels yet, but it did not work properly in Parallels version 2.

Using ASIO4ALL with the internal sound card, playback and recording are quite stable at a buffer size of 1024, but anything below that gets a little clicky. I don't mind lowering the latency and getting some clicks to do short spurts of softsynth tracking, but it's not like having a dedicated low-latency interface. I also made sure to ditch Parallels' built-in soundcard driver, and install the Realtek drivers directly from their website. Again, I'm curious to see how the Mbox 2 behaves in Parallels version 3, but haven't had a moment to test it yet.

Otherwise, SONAR behaves quite nicely. Just be sure to treat your virtualized Windows install with the same level of technical savvy and optimization that you would do for a dedicated PC box. It's still Windows, with all it's quirks; it's just not a physical computer that it's running on.

ORIGINAL: eikelbijter



I actually buy clothes from Goodwill! They have t-shirts a lot cooler than just about any other place, for $1.99 a piece! I have bought some Behringer gear and made recordings with it that sound as good as my buddy makes with his Neve/Apogee stuff; he knows what he's doing BTW.

The point is, when something costs more AND it's worth it (meaning it is actually BETTER), by all means buy it; when it's just about looks and design, you're an idiot if you spend more than you have to, unless you have money to burn. I can't begin to tell you how many musicians I know here in L.A. that run old macs because they can't afford to buy a new one. They are seriously limiting themselves by hanging on to their G4's............ Or, they buy a $3000 machine, and don't have money to buy mics/pres/etc.......

Rico

I wasn't expecting that response. My hats off to you. . And I agree on behringer. I have their digital mixer ( a steal at $600 new) and I love it.