Audio and MIDI functionality was one of the last areas of Mac OS X to fully develop: basic functionality was not available until OS X 10.1, and only with the debut of Jaguar 10.2 last summer was OS X truly ready for music and audio. The good news is, for the many users who have made the leap to Jaguar and have enjoyed this operating system's superior stability and MIDI/audio compatibility thanks to Core MIDI and Core Audio, 10.3 Panther is another step forward.

MOTU's press release minutes ago has revealed some details about improvements to Apple's underlying audio/MIDI support. Despite Apple's acquisition of rival Emagic, MOTU clearly remains close to the development process at Apple and is actually ahead of Emagic in terms of support for features like audio input names in its flagship software DP4. Those are subtle details, but greatly appreciated by users. 10.3 Panther enables three new features supported today by MOTU's audio drivers: more control over default stereo I/O, CoreAudio clocking across drivers, and custom input/output names.

Audio MIDI Setup in OS X already supports use of any Core Audio driver as the default stereo input and output, a bit like using the Sound control panel in OS 9, except that thanks to multiple interface support in X you can assign output of iTunes and still have it free to other programs. In 10.3, inputs/outputs can be whatever you choose, not just I/O 1-2 -- likely to be a huge boon to live performance, since you'll now be able to cue in QuickTime Player, for example, via headphones, without driving your main output.

Also revealed by today's MOTU updates: finally, we can create custom I/O names for Core Audio devices, currently supported in DP (hopefully in other programs, as well). Also, in a rather revolutionary feature, you will be able to clock one Core Audio device to another device's drivers: MOTU is already supporting clocking its FireWire interfaces to buil-in audio, MOTU PCI-424 core systems, and third party (!) devices. This way you can take advantage of Apple's multiple interface support without experiencing drift. This works in any host software, not just MOTU, though it does require MOTU FireWire drivers. Hopefully both these features will be supported by other Mac third parties.

I've been playing a lot lately with Apple's Audio MIDI Setup, and while it's over a year old, even recently I've discovered new features that I hadn't noticed before as I use X more intensively for music and audio work. There's no question in my mind, despite criticisms of some, that OS X is a giant leap forward in flexibility and stability from the convoluted world of OS 9 and OMS. All the folks here at MacMusic.org will be putting Panther through its paces, so stay tuned to find out what we find, and feel free to contribute yourself. Add feedback or discuss in the forums. 10.3 likely offers other improvements not mentioned here. Only the "Night of the Panther" will tell!

Ask Blinkbits BlinkList Blogmarks Bluedot Connotea Del.icio.us Digg

Diigo Dzone Facebook Fark Google Bookmarks Ma.gnolia Netscape Newsvine

Rawsugar reddit Shoutwire Simpy Slashdot Smarking Spurl Squidoo

StumbleUpon SWiK Tailrank Technorati Windows Live Wists Yahoo! My Web