Mac OSX

[siriusbliss]

In any event, yes, I guess an OSX version would be nice, but requires development and support resources that SC probably doesn't have at the moment.

Greg

Yeah but they would sell a lot more xites to pay for those resources. I for one would buy an xite immediately after a scope OSX release.

Most of the people with money in the industry have macs. Kind of ironic as thats the market the xite is aimed at.

Peace

Perhaps they would sell more, but perhaps not as much as you'd think.
It still comes down more to marketing and getting more developers to jump on the platform - arbitrary to which OS is used to SEE into the Scope environment .

IMO the budget for a cheap-ass PC (and who cares if it's Windoze - 90% of the Windows stuff isn't used for Scope anyways, so just turn it off) and Xite is still less than a Mac with Xite.

For Scope to go with OSX would ALSO require resources to develop Thunderbolt drivers (for PCIe), and graphics, etc. etc.

And there's a switch-aroo trend anyways with PT and Digital Performer building over for PC's as well, so it's a relative decision.

Windoze is NOT that different from OSX (I use both), and frankly like I said, with a dedicated cheap-ass PC and Xite, you'd hardly even notice.
You can really try to convince yourself otherwise, but it's really not the case IMO (and I'm just as old as many of you )

Besides, if you knew where I worked on a daily basis, you'd wonder why I wasn't more biased

Greg

[garyb]

about your concerns,
i agree. i wish these things could be dealt with sooner. it's not a matter of marketing. it's strictly a matter of money. you wouldn't believe what this all costs.

about stock, currently, it's two weeks. i might be able to scare something up immediately if it's really a pressing issue.

[dante]

It almost makes one feel like they don't really want to sell these things. Do they not have actual business people involved in the company over there - are they all engineers?

I get the impression they ARE mainly engineers who have to deal with business rather than vice versa. It's a product built out of labour of love that has managed to carve itself out an existance in a tough business world. And over and above the sheer coolness of the product, that to me is a reason to support it. If you see something good, what do you do ? Diamonds are forever because of the love, not the money.

My distant view is that they need to get some fresh eyes involved in product development, and seek out sufficient development capital. It is a little nerve racking to buy into a platform when the company seems more like someone's hobby than an ongoing concern. Sorry if that seems harsh - it's just my actual impression.

I find it strange you see it as nerve racking to own a product that has lasted over a decade while all other surrounding technology dies and has to be replaced every 3 years. To me the opposite is the case, I feel safer with Scope than any of the other DAW technology I run for that very reason.

Meanwhile, regards 'Fresh Eyes' I would have thought Open Scope is addressing this in spades, and for Mac compatibility now, theres always bootcamp, which many use successfully. Personally, Id save my money and get a cheap PC, Scope is way more important than the box it runs on.

[ErichG]

Fair enough - I am excited to see the OpenScope initiative, and your point about the platforms longevity is well taken; that it is still here speaks for itself. It just seems to me that a product with so much depth and history should realize a lot more market penetration, and the fact it hasn't seems to suggest some kind of "up by our bootstraps" stubbornness, or, frankly, a lack of business savvy, which has been the fate of a lot of great tech companies run by engineers.

Anyway - onward and upward!

-E

[garyb]

the problems are only money.

just to make an XITE takes literally the very top programmers and hardware designers in the business. nobody wants to even pay for a software update. if everyone that LOVED Scope got three freinds or acquaintances to buy an XITE, all your concerns would have already been addressed.

the problem is not the unwillingness to market correctly. it's just being a few hundred thousand dollars short of being able to do so. many other manufacturers start with deeper pockets, or only care about marketing and not making a truly unique product. there is NO capital. if there was something available, it'd already been tapped. this is why 75% of the audio market is owned by 3 or 4 mega corporations, Yamaha, Roland, Korg and Harmon. if you throw in companies like Peavey(Crest amplifiers and consoles), Fender, Digitech and Avid/Digidesign, that's 99% of what gets sold. since no one reads magazines, there's nowhere to advertise and what is available is unbelievably expensive. it's very tough.

i have to give Holger credit for sticking with his baby, and doing his best to keep it moving forward.

[ErichG]

Well - I'll definitely be buying one - and there is simply no question that it is by any reasonable measure the very best value in digital audio. Period.

I don't mean to be down on the product or the inventors at all. I'd just like to see some real money get behind it, and with so much depth and history, seems to me money shouldn't be the problem.

Thanks, Gary, for the feedback, and I'll be in touch shortly to place an order.

Kind Regards,
E

[siriusbliss]

It can be framed that we're jumping in on the second floor (rather than the ground floor), since many of us have been around and have ridden this thing down through the basement, to the sewer, and back out again, it only makes sense to keep going and ride this out towards it's (I believe) ultimate success.

I've worked at a lot of startups over the years, and in many ways SC is still considered a startup (or an up-start ). I've seen OVER-funded startups fail, and I have worked at UNDER-funded startups that have succeeded more due to the commitment of the core engineering team, and 'early' adopters that helped build the foundation.

I too would like to see more money and marketing come along sooner than later, and then the obvious branching out to OSX and beyond can grow from there.

I've seen it over and over again. It IS possible.

Greg

[garyb]

yes, it is.

[dante]

Shine on you crazy diamond.

[wouterz]

This would be bad news for heavy OSX DAW users:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/10/31/app ... -pro-line/

I personally lost my trust in Apple years ago when they bought Emagic and killed Logic and SoundDiver for the Windows platform.

[Fede]

nobody wants to even pay for a software update. if everyone that LOVED Scope got three freinds or acquaintances to buy an XITE, all your concerns would have already been addressed.

please, change attitude, stop defending what is undefendable.

No one of my friends nor professionals I know will ever buy something from SonicCore while they don't support macs. I'm the only one who wastes time and money with scope.

Conversely I, my friends and the professionals would certainly pay a fair amount of money for a useful software feature such as Mac support.

Stop whining about money. It's only a matter of choices: if they want money they MUST increase their user base.

Instead of wasting time and money in non strategic products such as Solaris or Modular4 or anything they did since SonicCore exists, they should have though more seriously about "THE PLATFORM" which is obviously the most important thing, solving existing annoying bugs and porting to mac *those 20 dlls* in the app\bin directory.

..but unfortunately love and money take to different places.

cheers,
a poor scope lover

[ErichG]

Not to devolve into a future of apple thread - but I'm not personally so concerned about the Mac Pro. It seems unlikely to me that they'll blow it off entirely, but on the other hand, my 27"iMac has 20Gigs of ram and thunderbolt, and is probably fast enough to handled any audio task I'd ever throw at it.

I'm also involved in 3D production. For all my rants about OSX, for rendering, or any compute task that doesn't involve a human in the loop, I'm perfectly happy to buy racks of blown out PCs to put linux on and keep in a rack in the basement.

In summary, the "usability" curves for proc, memory, and graphics have come together nicely in the iMac format as a workstation, whether that be for 2D, 3D, or audio. Beyond that, most people are thinking of boxes as render farm servers or similar, and it really is difficult to justify the additional cost associated with the Apple product for those applications, especially at scale.

[ErichG]

@Fede: I think I beat Gary up enough over this already, lol! It's not his company, and he's said over and over again that he supports the effort to get OSX online. I do think that just getting more people to buy the product is the "up by the bootstraps" approach, which doesn't seem to be achieving penetration. But it's impossible for us to know if S|C hasn't actually looked for working capital, or has found that professional audio is enough of a niche that it is, actually, hard to raise capital.

If porting 20 DLLs really is the scope of it, than it shouldn't be a herculean task. And if that is the case, and if it's open sourced, those of us that care enough about it can hire a team of freelancers from india and just make it happen, or do it ourselves, for that matter.

That said - I do agree that S|C seems to have an unhealthy focus on the synth side of things, when they would be addressing a much, much larger market if they focussed on the "it's a million dollar studio/stage in a box" part - which is almost true, if we could have more I/O and modern automation control. As it is, except for two very expensive mic preamps, I can't see any reason whatsoever to even buy the bigger box, unless you're a synth guy.

But, in any event - as I understand it, Gary is the guy doing more than any of the rest of us to get this thing to fly in the US, and he has no control over the pace or direction of development. So, for my part, I'm going to turn my focus to the OpenScope threads, and promoting the system to my friends in hollywood and the recording industry, and away from flogging Gary!

[siriusbliss]

How do you guys know whether an OSX version (in alpha or beta or whatever), or a Unix version, (or whatever) doesn't already exist at some SC lab somewhere? I don't, so I'm not going to speak into the wind.
I doubt SC is ignorant of what a Mac version would bring to the marketplace.

Scope's synths set it off from the also-rans like UA, which is why they are still supported. The synth market also draws people in.
Not everyone is a high-end studio owner (at least not anymore ). But yes, promoting Xite and Scope as a 'full-blown studio in a box' is also a good marketing angle.
And Scope's synths are awesome!

It's been discussed ad nauseum why or why they did not just entirely abandon all the prior Creamware users and start fresh.
Most of the current Scope is still legacy Creamware devices that SC did NOT need to support.
So now with open-Scope I think we'll see things evolve more in SC's desired direction rather than just entirely building on legacy code. At least I would hope so. Holger is not stupid or blind.

And besides this, Apple sells more Mac Pros than Dell or HP sell desktops.
I personally doubt they would kill the Pro.
The graph is erroneous because the ratio of iPad, MBP, Air sales has increased in proportion to the Pro. That's all.
Nevertheless I know guys in Hollywood buying up multiple Mac mini's just for rendering purposes, so I'm for one grateful to have so many options.

MacRumors is rarely accurate anyways.

Greg

[jksuperstar]

Most likely the biggest issues here is whether potential customers are consumers, pro-sumers, weekend artists, home studios, professional artists, or professional studios. Everybody seems to want S|C to market the crowd they understand, and of course going for the mass-market would not only get S|C a LOT more money, but with that almost inevitably comes the demands of a mass-market... "I want pretty graphics", and free updates, and works over USB, and my stereo doesn't work with the ADAT output at 96kHz?, and so on.

(insert vonnegut-esk asshole scribble here).

I admit, S|C can suite the needs of any of the above markets. Just know what comes with popularity. They'd have to start playing political games with the future of the product development. And then we'd have yet another (boring) product and company telling us how exciting it is! Look at Clavia, they made an organ once, made a ton of money at it, and now that's ALL they can make. Gone are their days of innovating synths that no one else even dreamed of.

The fact is, the world has also been in a slump economically as of late, and the fact S|C has survived through it is cause for celebrating enough Of course, more exposure would be helpful, but the *right* exposure and growth are what everyone is really hoping for.

[ehasting]

Again, sc needs some more big names on their plugin portfolio!
DAS is doing a huge deal for sc, same With adern and the others. But some branded stuff will give the platform more credibility from a marked perspective.

It could be made by das, but lisenced. Seriously! The studio effects from das is beyond great! If it was branded with API or ssl. At least some free marketing would have come out of it!

[siriusbliss]

Most likely the biggest issues here is whether potential customers are consumers, pro-sumers, weekend artists, home studios, professional artists, or professional studios. Everybody seems to want S|C to market the crowd they understand, and of course going for the mass-market would not only get S|C a LOT more money, but with that almost inevitably comes the demands of a mass-market... "I want pretty graphics", and free updates, and works over USB, and my stereo doesn't work with the ADAT output at 96kHz?, and so on....

Yes, it must be hard being a developer of this type of platform and not confront the possibility of having to be all things to all people.
Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing - just takes more overhead to manage it all.

Therefore I believe this is another reason that open-Scope is a good idea.

Let the developers run the asylum

Greg

[ErichG]

Excellent points. Managing growth and multiplying marketing channels can be more treacherous than barely scraping by. It's also easy to take decades of engineering experience for granted when considering pushing a tool like this into consumer hands. I know I wouldn't want to handhold leagues of consumers through signal-flow/gain-staging 101. Also your point regarding UAD is very well taken.

Meanwhile, the new strategy will allow them to be everything to everyone. Pros can leverage the toolkit, while "implementers" can create entirely purpose built UIs to for any application. And if the platform begins to gain penetration, entirely new commercial products can be built atop it. The main hold up to that is firmware level protocol and "connector" stuff (MADI, ethernet, OSC, et.al), which SC should (and no doubt is) focussing on. Again, I am far more concerned with getting OSC and more I/O than the host platform issue for my selfish purposes.

Providing a truly open platform, absent giant marketing (and as you well point out, customer support), is perhaps the perfect approach for getting from here to there. But this is going way off thread, and I'm headed over to the right place to continue that conversation.

[garyb]

actually, Solaris was a project that John Bowen paid for himself.

stop whining about money?
it's only because of John's Solaris money that 64bit win7 Scope is a reality.
NOTHING happens without money. nothing. this is not my attitude, it's just an unpleasant fact. i didn't make the satement that so angered Fede as a way to blame the userbase!

if an XITE isn't useful simply because of computer platform, then it's people who are more in love with computers than audio. this is only my opinion however, and as i said before, I FULLY SUPPORT an OSX VERSION!

[dante]

I admit, S|C can suite the needs of any of the above markets. Just know what comes with popularity. They'd have to start playing political games with the future of the product development. And then we'd have yet another (boring) product and company telling us how exciting it is!

+1 - the low market profile is not entirely a bad thing. Im not saying I want Holger & co to starve, I want the team to survive comfortably so we keep getting great things but we probably dont need another MacLogic YamaBorg assimulation killing off the innovation thats born naturally from small company freedom.

Is there any such thing as a silent partner ?

If an XITE isn't useful simply because of computer platform, then it's people who are more in love with computers than audio.

+1 on that one too.