Apple's Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger should be out very soon; eWeek reports
shipping is likely by mid-month or end-of-month at latest. So far, the
only major application CDM knows to be compatible with Tiger is Ableton
Live 4.11, which introduced compatibility tweaks versus 4.1. We're
still waiting on a long-promised update to Apple Logic 7; perhaps it
will accompany the new OS.
New OS releases are often accompanied by audio incompatibilities; even
10.3.8 brought its share of frustrations for some users. Apple hasn't
announced any major changes to 10.4 in terms of audio, but the smart
advice is still to wait to upgrade. Any good news for audio? You can
likely expect minor improvements based on previous releases and early
screenshots, plus the boost of QuickTime 7, which will bring features
like player recording capabilities. The biggest news here, though, is 64-bit support
throughout the OS and other performance enhancements. Pretty features
like Dashboard aside, this version of OS X should rock on high-end
systems.
If you're a developer and want to make an announcement about
compatibility now or when 10.4 is released, please contact me!
And what about Windows? Microsoft says Longhorn will be shipping
in 2006 and is doing its best to avoid more Apple hype. Windows
developers tell me that the transition to Longhorn for audio shouldn't
be too big a deal — nice to hear after the painful move from OS 9 to
OS X on the Mac — and privately, I've heard some of the biggies are
working on the new OS. Oh yeah, and Microsoft's response to OS X Tiger is basically, "What's a Mac?" while ZDNet's David Berlind says Apple should be worried about a Windows Media halo effect, not an iPod halo effect. Right. Because everyone has such a strong emotional attachment to Windows Media and MTV.com
that they'll dump their Macs and go buy new PCs. Well, it's good to
know the Mac vs. PC rivalry is still leading people to completely
irrational arguments.
The underlying news here: both operatings systems are working really well for audio, and both will be more fully 64-bit
very soon. I'm currently accepting reader submissions for good ways of
hiding credit cards so we can't find them and destroy them.