I think evidence of the wisdom of Magix position is found in soundBlade. Sonic delayed moving to OSX for the same reasons... then they delayed moving to UB. In both cases the change was as described: blowing up a mature, developed product for the port to a new OS. Once they fell behind the curve by delaying the port to OSX, the issues metastasized through Apple's shift to Intel. Suddenly they were developing TWO functionally identical apps, with entirely separate code bases. And still supporting an unrelated and obsolete third! Hopefully they'll be back in sync soon with a kick ass UB version. But in the meantime, we run PPC code under Rosetta on MacIntels, really killing the performance of the application. Supporting these separate applications is tough: things that are bug in one language work fine on the other code.
I read a lot of smack about SonicStudio's products here an elsewhere. I'll be the first to fault them for delaying the transition to X far too long, creating many of the issues they're facing. Yet as a small business owner, I'm pretty sympathetic to the broader plight... they're selling to a very tiny, picky and bizarrely price sensitive market (we'll spend thousands on cables, but bitch about upgrade licenses on specialized, critical tools no one else needs). Apple's move to Intel makes sense, but kills tiny developers of specialized code in the short run. All the things that make soundBlade special/different rely on talking directly to hardware, so when the hardware is abstracted from the app, things get weird.
I have a feeling all that is true for Magix. Device drivers and hardware-level communication is heavy stuff. I'm sure they could write a Mac version that works at a higher level of abstraction without too much pain. But if you want it to sound better than Core Audio, and you want the app to grip and dictate it's terms to the hardware, well, that's a lot harder and more expensive. This is what separates soundBlade from Waveburner Pro or Wave Editor or to some extent, Peak. It might be what separates Sequoia from Wavelab and other apps that rely on Windows to supply transport, routing and DSP.
Having lived through a couple of these shifts, I wouldn't wish the growing pains Sonic's users have endured on Magix users. Yeah, I love the mac, and have no doubt you guys might agree with Brad's main points regarding benefits of OSX. But porting to a new platform represents a huge cost for a small company, and the bill isn't just money. You bleed customers, reputation and time as well. The benefits of a slightly more stable OS are out-weighed by those costs in such a small market. If soundBlade went away, I'd move to Sequoia on PC before considering Waveburner Pro or Peak, simply because I trust/prefer a true mastering audio engine to a generic audio transport in a wild environment.
-d-
