Windows matters. It’s what roughly half of CDM readers use, and – for all the attention Apple gets – it’s a big part of the computer music world. Windows today also faces many of the same under-the-hood challenges that other operating systems do, so even if you’re a die-hard Linux or Mac user, you may want to pay attention.  You don’t need to love Windows, and you certainly won’t be hosting a Windows 7 launch party. You want to know if the OS will get out of your way and let you get to work.

Windows Vista proved what happens when an operating system’s many interconnected pieces are out of alignment. Even a graphics driver out of sync with underlying changes in the OS could render audio unusable, because just one missed sample can produce an audible glitch or dropout. Part of why I’m optimistic about Windows 7 is that Vista today is a radically different picture, thanks to many, many fixes delivered by Microsoft in updates and more mature audio and video drivers. But that means not just whether 7 is better than XP, but whether 7 is also better than Vista.

Vista wasn’t entirely alone: Mac and Linux have all had their share of growing pains in recent years. The devil is usually in the details. So, I again turn to one of the best guys in the business for sorting out all those technical details. Noel Borthwick, the CTO for Cakewalk, probably has a better big-picture view of how music and audio work in Windows than anyone on the planet. He’s a person hardware and software vendors outside Cakewalk often rely upon as a resource. Noel kept us technically honest on Vista, and he’s doing it again on Windows 7, with some exclusive information for CDM.

Those details get mighty technical, so here’s the punchline: Windows 7 is an OS Noel would use himself. It was hard to get anyone to recommend Vista over XP; loyal Windows-using developers I know still largely stick to XP. But would Noel switch from XP to 7?

Yes, absolutely. Windows 7 finally delivers on the stability and performance that users hoped for from Vista. The kernel changes and optimizations for large scale multi-core processors make it very attractive to DAW users who are interested in better low latency performance. I will be building a new DAW soon and Windows 7 X64 will be my OS of choice.

What’s new in Windows 7?

• Better multithreading: Improved performance of highly-multithreaded software and hardware by removing a significant bottleneck, especially relevant to a tool like SONAR
• Better memory management: Improved memory management when working with multiple threads
• Less nagging: More customization over UAC prompts (meaning they don’t have to nag you more than you want)
• More lightweight: Fewer system services run by default on a stock system, plus a leaner footprint of the OS
• Media support: More native media format support, including QuickTime MOV and H.264, plus drag-and-drop media transcoding
• Composite devices: More logical display of hardware with multiple functions (like audio and MIDI).
• FireWire: Enhanced FireWire support, with IEEE 1394b
• Multi-touch: Multi-touch display support
• Usability improvements: An improved user interface, task bar, and Libraries for managing files

If you’re ready for all the gory details, read on – including a frank appraisal of how all of this compares to XP in real-world performance, and what compatibility issues to look out for if upgrading from either Vista or XP.

Noel Borthwick of Cakewalk effectively wrote this story in response to my questions, so these answers all come from him. Microsoft has not responded to my requests for a review copy, so I’ll be able to evaluate this on my own system – albeit far less scientifically than Noel can – closer to launch.

WARNING: Extremely geeky details of the inner workings of Windows 7 follow, in keeping with our “never dumbed down” policy. If you’re a developer, you can likely get some leads on how to better support Windows 7 in a single point, something even Microsoft doesn’t provide as completely. But if you’re willing to dig, you get a rare view of the OS from a developer view – no marketing speak, no cheerleading, no fanboyism, no platform wars, no writing for the lowest common denominator.

What Actually Improves Audio Performance

Peter: In terms of performance for audio production, what are the significant differences in Windows 7?

Noel: Windows 7 on the surface is very similar to Windows Vista. It has the same audio driver support and same audio system infrastructure as Vista. However, it’s some of the under-the-hood improvements that are more significant for audio production. There are some interesting innovations and optimizations in the Windows kernel, making the OS more scalable for concurrent processing. This makes it attractive for highly multithreaded applications like SONAR. Additionally there are various new API’s/SDK’s that may be of significance to developers. Some highlights are below:

Multi-threading: Removal of the kernel “global dispatcher lock”

In Vista and earlier, on a highly multi-threaded system (e.g. SONAR running on an 8 core hyper-threaded Intel Core I7 PC), you have many threads all processing tiny audio buffers at low latency. All these threads are ultimately waiting on the dispatcher lock when it comes time for them to be managed by the Windows scheduler. This global lock becomes a bottleneck in the system and prevents efficient multi-core workload distribution and scalability. This problem gets magnified as you increase the number of cores since they are all gated by a common lock. In Win 7 the kernel team changed the logic in the Windows scheduler to abolish this global dispatcher lock and use per object locks. This effectively removes this age old bottleneck and allows Win 7 to scale better even under workloads of 256 processors.

This change means a lot to applications like SONAR that rely on multithreaded processing of very small workloads. Initial benchmark results have been promising in this regard. SONAR performs more efficiently at low latency on multi core machines.

Improved Memory Management – PFN database lock

The PFN (page frame number) database lock was used by the memory manager to lock pages of memory in the working set. Like the dispatcher lock above, this would gate memory access from different threads causing resource contention. Work in this was first done in Windows server 2003 SP1 and Windows 7 has now has this optimization as well, improving asynchronous access to memory.

Power Optimization: Core Parking

Windows 7 has a new feature called Core Parking. Core Parking is a power saving optimization that shifts processing load to one or more cores and puts other less busy cores to “sleep”. The objective is to let other cores idle if workload levels allow for it. This optimization had us scratching our heads when we ran a benchmark test on a Quad Core I7 machine. At any point in time, we would notice that some cores were idle in task manager. The reason for this turned out to be Core Parking. Core parking can be useful to save battery life while running projects on laptops.

Better WaveRT Performance

Unlike Windows Vista, Win7 now uses event mode internally. This is good news, since it will help guarantee that HDAudio drivers in Win7 support WaveRT event mode properly. Additionally event mode is now part of WHQL logo certification for driver vendors, so any WAVERT device must support this to get a Win7 compatibility logo.

Ed. note: The plain-English translation here is that WaveRT, Microsoft’s own real-time audio driver facility, now is more likely to work the way you expect. Cockos, makers of REAPER, actually provided the ability to turn off WaveRT Event Mode at the end of last year because of unpredictable results. Windows 7 should resolve these issues.

Other Improvements

Peter: Noel also assembled some other improvements worth noting in Windows 7. They’re subtle, but useful: you may finally be able to avoid installing QuickTime/iTunes just to play some video files, interfaces with audio and MIDI jacks don’t have to show up separately any more, there’s improved FireWire support, usability improvements, and multi-touch on mainstream computers is now nearly here.

Noel:

Additional File Format support

Windows 7 adds native playback support for media in MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVCHD, ADTS, M4A, and WTV multimedia containers. It has native codec’s for H.264, MPEG4-SP, ASP/DivX/Xvid, MJPEG, DV, AAC-LC, LPCM and AAC-HE

Yes you read that right – QuickTime MOV file support is now natively available in Windows 7 so you don’t need to install QuickTime. Another big plus is that this is supported under the X64 version of Windows 7 as well, something you cannot do with Apple’s native QuickTime itself!

All media files using these codec’s should play in Media Player. It appears that these new codec’s are exclusively available to Media Foundation applications and not via other legacy API’s such as DirectShow etc.

File format transcoding

File format transcoding of many popular formats is now built into the Windows 7 shell. I.e. dragging and dropping files onto a device automatically performs the necessary format transcoding if the format is supported. This was primarily done to copy formats to portable devices like cameras but should be useful in other scenarios as well.

Multi-function devices and Device Containers:

Prior to Windows 7, every device attached to the system was treated as a single functional “end-point”. While appropriate for single-function devices (such as an audio interface), this does elegantly represent multi-function devices such as a combination audio/MIDI interface. In Windows 7, the drivers and status information for multi-function device can be grouped together as a single "Device Container", which is then presented to the user in the new "Devices and Printers" Control Panel as a single unit.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/Device/DeviceExperience/ContainerIDs.mspx

Note: this should not be confused with device aggregation as is available with Core Audio on Mac OS. On the Mac, you can treat multiple audio interfaces as though they’re one interface, so, for instance, you could get extra outputs by combining a couple of audio interfaces, and your software will see them as if they’re just one box. But SONAR provides this capability on its own, so if you’re a SONAR user, you can get the same functionality.

FireWire/USB

Windows 7 contains a new FireWire (IEEE 1394) stack that fully supports IEEE 1394b with S800, S1600 and S3200 data rates. According to reports, USB 3.0 may be supported in a future Windows Update. It was initially planned for Win7 but is not supported in the shipping version of Win7 due to delays in the USB 3 specification.

Multi-touch

Windows 7 includes integrated support for multi-touch displays.

Libraries

Libraries are user-defined collections of content including folders. It’s a handy way to categorize and create shortcuts to samples, music, etc. Special shell folders (Documents, Pictures, Music, and so on) are now Libraries.

Accelerators for Windows

Windows 7 Accelerators provide a way for learning more about selected text, optionally using voice control.

Virtual hard disks

The Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7 incorporate support for the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file format. VHD files can be mounted as drives, created, and booted from.
An installation of Windows 7 can be booted and run from a VHD drive, even on non-virtual hardware, thereby providing a new way to multi boot Windows.

Leaner Footprint

Win7 has a leaner footprint and has been tweaked to work well on less powerful PC’s, laptops and Netbooks. I have heard reports of Win7 working more smoothly on machines that would be slow under Vista.

Listen Mode

Another nice touch in Win 7 is that they now have a listen tab in the audio properties. Turning on "listen mode" basically routes input to the default output device allowing you to monitor an input device in Windows itself. Sadly this runs via the Windows audio engine which is always running in WASAPI shared mode, so it’s subject to a 30 msec delay. Of course you can always load an application like SONAR and route the audio inputs to an output for low latency monitoring.

Compatibility: What to Watch

Upgrading from Vista

Peter: Relative to Vista, are there any changes that are likely to introduce new compatibility issues with hardware or software?

Noel: With any new OS there is always the potential for compatibility issues. Win7 is built on the Vista foundation and one of its goals was better compatibility. As such most applications that are Vista compliant should work as well or better in Windows 7. UAC in Windows 7 has been improved so this might also help with general compatibility problems with some applications.

We have run into only a couple of compatibility issues in Win7 during the course of our development/testing of SONAR 8.5.

The MMIO API in Win7 (typically used for writing RIFF wave files) has a compatibility issue with the mmioDescend API with LIST ‘WAVE’ chunks. This caused our code that reads audio bundle files to fail and read scrambled audio data. We worked around this problem in 8.5

In WASAPI exclusive mode under Win7, the minimum latency you can achieve is now unfortunately 3ms and the code reports an error if lower. The fact that Vista has no such limitation has been reported to Microsoft. Hopefully its a mistaken fence in their code and this issue is fixed via an update, since it’s a step backwards for low latency in WASAPI mode.

Ed.: That last issue is an interesting one for anyone really pushing the envelope with low latency, so I’ll keep in touch with Noel if there’s any update.

Upgrading from XP

Peter: What hardware and software compatibility issues should users be aware of if they’re thinking of migrating not from Vista but from XP to Windows 7?

Noel: The compatibility issues that typically affect users migrating from XP to Vista/Win7 are:

UAC problems: Many applications and plug-ins are not built to handle the newer security settings in these OS’s. For example, if an application relies on something that requires administrative access it will fail when running as a limited user in Win7. This is a serious issue since in Vista/Win7 even if you are running from an administrator account; programs are launched by default with limited user privileges. Unlike XP, you have to explicitly run as an administrator to use such programs. To be Win7 logo-compatible, all applications need to should support running as a limited user.

Drivers: Although for most practical purposes audio drivers in XP and Windows 7/Vista are similar (you still need to write WDM drivers) there are sometimes quirks in specific drivers may cause problems. Most typical driver issues here are caused by installers that make assumptions about the OS version. In many cases this issue can be solved by the end user by setting the “compatibility mode” to Vista in the file properties for the appropriate driver installer file. (Right click the setup exe file to set its properties)

Ed.: I don’t feel either of these is a deal-killer, as I’ve been living with Vista for some time, but they’re still worth watching out for if upgrading from XP. And it means if you have an older machine that’s still working properly, you’re just likely to leave it on XP and worry about sorting the upgrade on a new box.

Less Nagging?

Peter: We talked when Vista came out about User Account Control and particularly audio-specific tasks that required elevation or different handling of permissions in Vista. I know UAC has been streamlined in W7. Do these changes impact audio apps at all? Are there corresponding under-the-hood changes?

Noel: The UAC changes in Win7 are primarily to allow more customization over the UAC elevation prompting process. There are no changes to the fundamentals of how UAC itself works that I am aware of. The classic problem with audio applications with UAC is when programs or plug-ins write to areas of the registry or file system prohibited from standard user access. Even when you are running as an administrator, by default when you launch a program (or the program itself launches a secondary process) Windows 7 will run that process with standard user privileges. If a program or plug-in attempts to write to an area which it doesn’t have write privileges for, virtualization will kick in. While this may allow the program to work, in general it is bad practice to rely on virtualization, since it can cause many unwanted side effects and behaviors in applications.

There are now four customization settings for UAC:

1. Never notify (least secure). The user is not notified when a program tries to install software or make changes to the computer. The user is not notified when they make changes to Windows settings or when programs try to do so.

2. Only notify me when programs try to make changes to my computer. The user is not notified when a program tries to install software or make changes to the computer. The user is not notified when they make changes to Windows settings. However, the user is notified when programs try to make changes to the computer, including Windows settings.

3. Always notify me. The user is notified when a program tries to install software or make changes to the computer. The user is also notified when they make changes to Windows settings or when programs try to do so.

4. Always notify me and wait for my response (most secure). The user is notified when a program tries to install software or make changes to the computer. The user is also notified when they make changes to Windows settings or when programs try to do so.

Customization and Tuning Advice

Peter: How much customization would you advise people do to their OS? That is, you’ve just installed a build of Windows 7 for working with SONAR on a test machine. Do you run the stock configuration, or start turning off services, disabling disk indexing, etc.?

Noel: Optimization and customization is a topic that can’t be fully discussed in the scope of a brief article. In general you need to optimize a system when you have known bottlenecks. Otherwise you can spend a lot of time tweaking things that have little effect on the end goal. In fact, you may even end up destabilizing a perfectly working system. A stock Win7 machine is not optimized for audio necessarily but it appears MS put some thought into trimming out unwanted startup tasks to cut down on startup time. For example there are now “Triggered start services” in Windows 7, so out of the box you can have fewer services running after a fresh boot. There are probably many background services in a modern DAW that could be suspended if you don’t need them but they should be evaluated on a case by case basis depending on what you use the machine for.

Peter: A lot of users were advising running Vista with Aero off, certainly in the early days. Do you think it’s now advisable to leave Desktop Window Compositing switched on for audio work? (Note: I am aware that there’s actually no way to *completely* disable the Aero windowing environment in a way that it reverts to XP, as even in Class mode with no compositing settings the engine has been altered.)

Generally speaking, turning off Aero will free up some resources on your system, since it uses more costly 3D graphics rendering and transparency a lot. However on any modern graphics card, Aero offloads a lot to the GPU so unless your DAW is also competing for the same GPU resources, turning it off may or may not make an appreciable difference to performance. Most applications that are not graphics intensive use GDI for rendering to the screen and since GDI doesn’t take advantage of DirectX hardware acceleration it’s normally not contesting with the GPU. If you are using plug-ins that use Direct 2D or Direct3D, you are probably better off disabling Aero.

Launch Party, After All?

Thanks, Noel. So, the big news behind all of this is that a move from XP to Windows 7 is finally advisable.

I would still caution, as I did recently with Mac OS Snow Leopard, that you typically don’t want to upgrade to a new OS the day it launches. You’ll want to verify compatibility with your software and hardware before making the jump.

That said, this is an unusual upgrade in that it appears to resolve more issues than it introduces. I actually haven’t been able to find a single user out there testing Windows 7 who has found any issues with audio or music production. Of course, when it launches, we’ll have a much larger test base, so I expect we’ll find something – even Windows Service Packs and point releases of Mac OS have been known to create some issues. As we get closer to launch, I’ll review how you would backup your existing XP or Vista system to ensure that if you do choose to upgrade, you can revert to a previous version.

I am, however, cautiously optimistic. And now is an especially good time to make the jump to 64-bit. It’s easier on Windows than any other OS at the moment, and easiest in SONAR, because SONAR allows you to easily migrate 32-bit plug-ins into the 64-bit environment. You’ll need a 64-bit machine and enough memory to make 64-bit worthwhile, but if you’re building a new workstation, as Noel is, the timing could be perfect.

I also think there’s plenty of room left to talk about issues that go between operating systems, particularly how audio software can better support multi-threading and processing on the GPU, multi-touch, as well as emerging I/O standards like USB3. (OpenCL, much-touted in Snow Leopard, is also supported on Linux and Windows, and Linux actually beat both Mac OS and Windows to the punch in providing a first implementation of USB3.) Correction: I should also add that the excellent Reaper has also added this feature. With full 64-bit support in Cakewalk’s own Dimension and other instruments, NI’s Kontakt sampler, and the bundled 64-bit-native plug-ins in Reaper and SONAR, that means you can build a really capable 64-bit rig on Windows.

With fixes getting the OS out of your way, we can return to issues that really matter, many of which apply to every OS.

Music is, as always, the perfect place to talk about these issues. We push our machines harder than just about anyone, and in ways that are the least tolerant of timing discrepencies and glitches. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you want to look into the future of computing, ask a musician.

And that calls for a party.

Previous coverage:

SONAR 8.5 and how it can smooth the transition to 64-bit (8.5 is the build that includes Windows 7-specific improvements)

Vista Tweak: Use the Audio Profile Cakewalk’s CTO Uses

Optimizing for Vista: Inside the Mechanics of SONAR 8 with Cakewalk Engineering

Adieu, XP; How Vista SP1 is Doing, and Why This OS Generation Has Been So Tough

Vista for Audio, 1 Year Later: Talking OS Plumbing with Cakewalk’s CTO

Vista for Music + Pro Audio: Exclusive Under the Hood with Cakewalk’s CTO

And yes, I think Noel deserves an Honorary Contributing Editor position for all he’s done giving us absurdly-precise inside details for how Windows works.

Microsoft product screen shot(s) reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation.

The DJ Booth at Bily Kun where Bidule was first conceived.

Ed.: Music creation is all about the special relationship we have with certain, powerful tools. And one app that gets very little attention is unquestionably the deep but elegant modular patching environment Plogue Bidule. CDM turns to power user Primus Luta to kick off a series on learning this tool, starting with an exclusive interview with Bidule’s creators. And if the interview sounds, at times, more than a little pro-Plogue in bias, make no mistake: this is love. Primus Luta takes it away, as we look forward to his upcoming how-to series. -PK

In the modular future, the Bily Kun will be a leading tourist attraction for Montreal. Patrons will come with laptops tucked under their arms sporting fork bomb t-shirts. The bartenders by then will be used to answering the question only tourists ask with a slight wave of the hand toward seats on the other side of the bar. The tourists will follow that wave to the ultimate destination of their pilgrimage, open their laptop, and broadcast their location to bidulers everywhere, before reenacting some sort of virtual cabling ritual to mark their presence at the conception place of Plogue.

“It all started what seems a long time ago,” Sebastien Beaulieu, Plogue co-founder tells me. “David (Viens of Plogue) was coding a few VST plugins to add new toys to Ross Bencina’s AudioMulch. We would meet up one evening a week to code a few cool bits then head up for beer afterwards at the minimal techno pub in Montreal called Bily Kun, where most of the ideas for the future came into place.”

It was the late 1990’s. Modular audio was just coming out of a clumsy adolescence. Miller Puckette rewrote his then decade old MAX software in a new open source format to create Pd. David Zicarelli founded Cycling ‘74 to continue development of the original MAX codebase beginning with a new audio processing engine – MSP. Ross Bencina released the first of thirty six public beta versions of AudioMulch. It was a developing frontier, still early enough that the horizon couldn’t completely be made out. And while working on what would be the first Plogue product, the VST plugin ReBuilder, what would become the Plogue team started envisioning a horizon they could paint themselves.

“Once we had one completed VST,” Sebastien continues, “we decided we needed some kind of entity to release them. We ditched our temporary name while(1)fork();, used to provide a ‘label’ name for our various IDM/Minimal DJ sets. Found a Quebec anglicism/slang word for ‘plug’, some nice chaps to design our logo, and so Plogue was born.

Plogue Bidule

We did another VST plugin (MixedGrains) and then started on Bidule, which, at the start, was to be an app that would improve on both AudioMulch and MAX/MSP, in terms of providing the user with a smaller learning curve to do more. An application that could both be used as an easy modular application, because of high-level objects, and a more advanced one with low-level objects that, depending on your usage, interest or knowledge, you might never need to even look at to get you going making sounds.”

An ambitious endeavor to say the least, starting from scratch in an attempt to improve on a technology while decreasing the learning curve. All of this with a core team that in the decade since founding would only grow to four members, only three of whom are coders, and of those three only Sebastien spends 100% of his time on Bidule.

“Bidule was coded from the start with portability in mind,” he explains, “so the code is mostly C++ and STL. It uses OpenGL for the patchbay rendering. The ‘graph traversal code’ is optimized for various connection types and feedback paths. XML is used to ‘mirror’ the processing graph for serialization.”

Simple, but quite powerful. Powerful enough to attract the attention of some of the bigger names in audio software, such as Garritan and Sibelius, who came to Plogue looking for licensing opportunities. When asked if this was always a part of the Plogue business plan Sebastien firmly states, “Definitely not, but once the opportunity presented itself we thought of it has a good way to sustain and grow. The ARIA Project is a different case because we are developing that in collaboration, which means it’s something we can also use for our own products. This explains why it was developed as a sample playback/synth hybrid engine rather than a straight sample playback one.”

With a reliable buisiness to business revenue stream one can’t help but wonder what influence that has in the development of Bidule. “Our licensing work does not have much influence on what is Bidule,” Sebastien explains. “Licensing work is usually started from our base components/libraries, some Bidule-borrowed code and our knowledge from doing audio plugins and applications. There are way too many things in Bidule to use that as the basis of a licensable audio engine without ending up with either an awful amount of #ifdef or too much code separation in different files.”

On the business end of things he states, “While the added income enables us to pay ourselves and employees it also takes time to do and that time is taken away from our own projects. There’s no way to know what would have happened if we strictly worked on our stuff, would we be at the same point we are now with a physical office and employees? Would we still be working from home? Or would we have given up on doing much more interesting work for less money and gone back to your typical programmer job full time and code the fun stuff evenings and weekends?”

There’s a constantly growing community of bidulers who are thankful not to have to worry about those possibilities. Congregating in the forums, the community in many ways acts as the additional staff for Plogue. It’s an interesting model, because while bidule is proprietary the communal nature of development is reminiscent of open source. One only need look at the Feature Request section of the forums to realize the high percentage of requests that end up in future releases of the software.

“There are several possible way to use Bidule,” Sebastien explains, “and we obviously cannot think of all of them. That is where the community input is important. We can’t even count the number of times forum posts, discussions and emails have led to new features in Bidule or changed the way we were going to approach a specific feature.” As such, you can find Seb (as he’s known in the community) in the forums regularly logging bugs, discussing problems, and ensuring user needs are met. Three years ago those user needs resulted in an SDK. “The SDK came up as a quick way to add new modules. There are times when users need something totally specific to their use or setup and it doesn’t make sense to add it inside Bidule. With the SDK, anyone having some basic code skills can add their own module.”

The true testament to the power of Bidule are what the users are able to do with it. When asked for example use cases Sebastien replies, “Building a setup for an art gallery installation where control comes from external sources. DSP companies using Bidule for quick prototyping of larger algorithms and systems through building blocks and SDK-built modules. People playing live in all sorts of music styles from experimental to jazz and even faith gatherings!

“Some things have just surprised us to find out that they were even possible with Bidule,” he continues. “For example Bram de Jong made a basic time-stretching algorithm out of basic bidules. Someone else made some noise reduction algorithm out of side effects of Bidule’s FFT algorithms. There’s also what you’re doing, which we found interesting because you’re basically building a complete instrument within Bidule and documenting the process.”

All of this with a software still in beta. Easily surpassing the thirty six beta versions of Audio Mulch and going into its seventh year of public beta, perhaps the Guiness Book of Records should be contacted. When asked whether the 1.0 version of Bidule would see release this year, Sebastian navigates his web browser to a virtual Magic 8 Ball site and types the question. The answer is: Very Doubtful.

“Bidule 1.0,” he explains, “has been a long standing internal debate in here. If you made a list of programmers that can’t let go until it’s perfect, you would find us in the upper portion. Lets just say we especially dislike ‘version 6.x’ applications that crash when you just look at them and the endless cycle of pay the yearly (or so) update fee to get a few bugs fixed.” Strangely enough for active bidulers, 1.0 may not be that important. The communal style of development is perhaps the most valuable part of Bidule. Would that come to an end if it were to come out of beta?

“I don’t see why it would stop because we think it has served us very well so far. More importantly, everyone at Plogue uses Bidule as their main development/test tool for everything else they do (like ARIA and chipsounds for instance). It’s our pen, if you will. With that mindset, as long as Plogue is alive, so will Bidule.”

An Alpha Version of Bidule Running on Linux Circa 2001

If Bidule has any limitations, it is perhaps the lack of a Linux version. When asked what’s keeping the software from being ported to the open OS, Sebastien quickly responds, “A time machine might help!” As it would seem back in 2001 there was an alpha version of Bidule which did run on Linux, development on which has since ceased. “I think our main concern is that we are not yet totally convinced of the viability and welcomeness of closed-source applications to Linux. Pretty much every thing else would fall into the lack of time category (most of our other concerns would probably be answered by research and testing), chasing two major platforms is already a time-consuming task, we’re not yet ready to add a third major one.” That shouldn’t be read as the end of the conversation for Linux users. If there’s anything which cannot be overstated about the Plogue team it is that community demand moves them.

This week Plogue launches the latest public version of Bidule 0.9685. As with all public releases it comes with a three month trial period for users to demo the software. To coincide with this, I’ve been given a space over on CDM’s NoisePages where I will be providing a series of introductory and advanced tutorials in Bidule, using the instruments created for my Heads Project as examples. You can read all about the latest Bidule release and after you’ve downloaded you’re copy make your way through the first tutorial. If you’ve ever wanted to have a look at what Bidule is all about, now is the perfect time.

In the modular present, Plogue Bidule has achieved much of what it set out to do – smaller learning curve, doing more. The modular future is bright.

“Total freedom to experiment, and try ideas fast.”

…the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.

To Our Developers

I would be remiss if I didn’t give Apple some credit for making this move. This is what really matters: being responsive to criticism. We’re seeing some tremendous innovation in development for the iPhone and iPod touch, and in the mobile arena in general, from new kinds of synths and music making applications to Star Trek-like controllers. It’ll make a big difference to those developers to be able to talk.

And, speaking of which, this now means we can have all of those developer discussions that were crippled by the NDA. So, developers, we’d love to hear from you.

Whether you care about the iPhone or not, the Summer of iPhone Development reveals a lot about where mobile computing, and mobile music creation, might be headed. That includes Apple’s challenges as well as its accomplishments.

Despite the hype around Apple’s platform, the iPhone and iPod Touch have some strengths and weaknesses, just as any platform does. The strengths you probably know well by now: slick UIs, rich, mobile-optimized developer tools, and a device people love. That has given us some interesting, genuinely-useful music tools amidst the toys and novelties, demonstrating how even a niche can benefit from development capabilities. But the tight development and distribution restrictions, imposed by Apple and their exclusive US service provider AT&T, have compounded some of the negatives of the device. The result is a platform that has some developers raving and some ranting (sometimes simultaneously).

The big news for digital musicians, specifically, is that restrictions created by Apple may keep some music apps from shipping, or for supporting Apple’s official, exclusive SDK and store.

Case in point: the tasty-looking MIDI controller you see above hasn’t made it into the store – and it’s not alone. If the developer were able to distribute it, you’d have it right now. With Apple controlling the store, you might have it tomorrow, or next month, or never – the frustrating thing being, the developer doesn’t even know. And poor communication in regards to the store is just one challenge that’s turning some developers off from Apple’s device.

Digital music creation was built on the openness of the Windows, Mac, Linux, and even Palm and Windows Mobile platforms. That means the situation with Apple’s locked-down development channels is one to watch closely. It also could mean the jailbroken, hacked iPhone platform is here to stay — and that competing platforms could gain some ammunition from Apple’s relatively closed nature.

Not All Developers Are Happy

It goes without saying that some of Apple’s moves have made some developers very happy indeed. The iPhone/iPod Touch is a platform that strikes a unique balance between desktop-class functionality and what’s needed on a mobile device. Developers have complained that platforms like PalmOS or Java ME are overly stripped-down for mobiles, whereas Windows Mobile isn’t optimized enough and is too much like the desktop OS. Apple has done a lot to balance those concerns and wrap it into a beautifully-designed UI and hardware. (To see just how much they’ve done, look no further than AppleInsider’s iPhone 2.0 critique. Even as they complain about the iPhone’s flaws, they note the ways in which competing devices are worse.)

But that doesn’t mean all of Apple’s developers are happy campers. Here’s a quick round-up of some of the complaints:

Apple won’t let some developers on their device. StyleTap, a platform that emulates Palm OS, is now forced to run on the jailbroken iPhone, because Apple won’t let non-native software on their device. (Bhajis Loops on the iPhone could be possible, music fans, but only if you hack your iPhone or iPod.) Other victims include Java, Python, Flash — major tools that make up the current computer ecosystem and would also be powerful for digital musicians and visualists. Now, of course, arguably this protects Apple’s quality control and helps AT&T control the apps on their network – except that plenty of other phones have exactly the same capabilities, including phones on AT&T that ship in greater quantity. And many of these are perfectly reliable, whereas the iPhone 2.0 update was, at least initially, plagued by crashes. It’s Apple’s choice to do this, of course – just as it’s your choice to buy or develop for a different device, if you like.

Apple is failing to communicate with developers. Apple has complete control of the iTunes-based App Store — without it, you can’t install apps on the device. Maybe that would be fine, if developers felt that they could communicate with Apple. But Rogue Amoeba, a long-time, loyal Apple audio developer, reports that the road to approval is broken for many developers. ("Broken" is his word, not mine.) Rogue’s Paul Kafasis isn’t bugged by the exclusiveness of the store so much as that "Ultimately, the problem here is with communications, or lack thereof, from Apple." (Paul regularly covers iPhone innards for O’Reilly Digital Media blog.)

That story was written at the beginning of June. The problem is, it’s now August, and things don’t seem to have gotten better. Now, developers often complain (they’re very much like users in that way). But there’s an unusual level of frustration with getting onto the App Store, and the reports are fairly consistent:

Apple Developer Discussion Forum

Maybe this is a logjam because the store is new and popular, so I think final judgment is reserved for later. But clearly, if Apple is to defend their choice of total control over the store, they have to fix the problem eventually. After all, there are plenty of other gadgets which don’t require you to go through one vendor just to ship an app. Want to install something to your Symbian, Windows Mobile, Palm, or even Blackberry device? You just go and do it; you don’t have to check with your vendor or your mobile carrier first. So the burden is clearly on Apple to demonstrate that their choice was the right one.

Apple is gagging developers and making coding harder. Apple has placed an Non Disclosure Agreement on their developer tools, including all details of how the device works and how to run software on it. Initially, this occurred during the beta, but it appears now, with the store, the firmware update, and the developer kit all officially shipping, it’ll last forever. Ars Technica’s Chris Foresman goes into detail about all the problems this can cause. It boils down to this: developers can’t get and share information, can’t even go to Amazon to buy a good book on development, and the quality and stability of the entire platform can’t reach its full potential as a result.

Again, I can’t think of another precedent like this. I expect there are similar restrictions placed on gaming consoles, but that hasn’t necessarily been a good thing — just ask a a developer for gaming consoles. And would it really cause the universe to implode if you could buy a good book on iPhone development, or read a developer blog that gives you tips for how to write good apps?

iTouchMidi, the MIDI App You Can’t Have (Yet)

As a case study in how this can break down and keep you from doing something cool with the iPhone you just bought, I just heard from Nonnus, the developer of a set of MIDI controller apps for iPhone. You should be able to download these now, free, from the iTunes App Store. But you can’t.

This case reveals just how delayed many apps are. The developer applied to the program essentially when it was launched, months ago. The app itself is approved. Yet contract foul-ups are keeping that app from getting to you. It might seem a small thing,

i was one of the first ones to register as iphone dev,
but due to the lack of info that program registration was limited to the first 4000
i got locked out of early processing
on the july 12 i was finally able to join the dev program,
allowing me to start up the itunes store account and all contractual process
i have submitted all requested info weeks ago and have never received any feedback about this
yet all my contracts, including free apps one are still pending setup
regarding itouchmidi:
the first app was submitted on the 20 th of july
on the 28 i got a reply stating the iTouchMidi name was not accepted because of the iTouch part
i did not really understand or agreed as there is no apple product with this name,
and if it is scheduled it is not really my problem…
anyway, i did not want to delay anything or felt i could do anything about it
so i changed the name to iTM Midilab for the first app
in the meanwhile i have also submitted iTM Matrix, iTM Keys and iTM XYPad
last saturday, august 3, i received feedback that all the  apps had been aproved
but as the contracts are still pending setup the apps will not go to the store,
even though they are free (for now…)
although dev support response has never been great,
probably due to the sheer number of requests they have
they have always replied to previous questions or issues
but since august 3,
i have tried to contact them several times for different support depts
itunes admin, itsvendor, devprograms
and have received absolutely no reply except one from itunes admin telling me to contact devprograms
wich i had already done…
today is august 6, i still have received no reply
all apps are pending contract,
i already have new versions that i am unable to upload and take some little advantage of the lockup to improve user experience
(also asked about this in these last emaisl sent)
i am really starting to feel something terribly wrong is going on
as i am sure that 72 hours of silence to all info / support request is not normal at all
maybe i am getting paranoid but i start to feel iTouchMidi is being deliberately locked out from the store / public

Just a nuisance? Sure, possibly. You can imagine that a developer who has put time and effort into writing something would be more than a bit annoyed, though. And it’s not isolated, based on what we’re hearing from other developers, large and small.

This does seem fixable to me. But the issue is that contract hold-ups have created a massive app log-jam in the store, which is likely to shake some of the confidence of Apple’s developer community. I suppose if I wanted to be paranoid, I could suggest that Apple is blocking Nonnus’ apps because they’re planning a MIDI controller of their own – and they do have the patent portfolio suggesting just those kinds of applications.

More likely, though, this just sounds like a pattern of administrative screw-ups that are slowing down the store. But that does weaken the argument for Apple having a monopoly on app distribution. (Apple, as you’ll recall, were the ones who told us what a great idea this would be.) And whatever you as a user might think, I can tell you that is scaring away at least some developers.

(For Nonnus’ part, he says he’s "just complaining [about] the current state of things.")

Why All of This Matters

The iPhone and iPod Touch clearly aren’t for everyone. But they demonstrate some of the potential of some important technologies:

• Mobile, portable devices
• Low energy-consumption, low-heat platforms
• Multi-touch interfaces
• The Mac platform

Moreover, before iPhone fans start accusing me again of Apple bashing, I always believe a technology worth using is a technology worth criticizing. For all my own personal skepticism, I’m constantly reminded at how incredible and unique some of Apple’s accomplishments are. I would hope anyone working on mobile development at least considers what they’ve done as a result — even as I hope people do come up with interesting competing tools. But there’s no question "worth criticizing" applies, on many levels.

Music is a great measure of how platforms work for development, because of how demanding music apps are of interface and performance. We also have a deeper relationship with them, because we use them to be expressive. That’s why it’s worth bringing up these issues on this site.

The Apple operating system isn’t Linux, and even as a fan of Linux, I’m not sure it should be. But there are other issues here that go beyond even open source or free software development, and strike at whether we’ll even be able to talk about development or run the apps we want. If that changes, computing could look very different than it does today.

The LinuxSampler project offers GigaSampler 3 compatibility for Linux and Windows, so it’s already an open alternative for dealing with your orphaned Giga sampler files. (Naturally, you could also look to a number of Giga-compatibility samplers on the market.)

But the open source community has long been under fire — often rightly so — for simply copying proprietary software rather than doing something new and innovative. I enjoy "new and powerful," so that sounds like a great idea, and that’s what Darren is proposing. He writes:

What I want to do is build a code framework (not to be confused with a library) that will contain classes for handling streaming sample playback, resampling, and all that fun stuff, as well as directed graph building for DSP. From here, the framework can be used to build monolithic applications for sampling and synthesis, as well as a Reaktor-like application, if we do it right.

Yes, it would be better to split things out into libraries, but that takes a lot more work, and I’m tired of things not happening. The sooner we can get some code working, the better.

I should also mention that there are existing open source libraries we can and will leverage, like libsndfile, libsamplerate, libfftw3, and the Rubber Band library, so we won’t be starting completely from scratch.

This sounds terrific to me — not necessarily as a replacement for existing, proprietary tools, but as a framework on which new tools could be built. There are research and compositional projects that could absolutely benefit from the existence of such a library. And having this tool as an option could strengthen computer music platforms in general. (In other words, wherever you stand in terms of open source and philosophy, it could be a good thing. Hey, I’m happy all around — I couldn’t live, basically, without both systems.)

But enough theory — the idea needs developers and real code, so it’s not just an idea.

If you’re a developer, do get in touch. I’m happy to help host and support any such work in any way we can via CDM. Darren is on gmail as dmlandrum, or leave a comment here.

By the way, happy OSCON day.

Image: jagelado. (Interestingly, since the creation of that image, Microsoft has come to make more use of open source — you can argue about the reasons, but not the effect.)

We are saddened to learn that Juan Antonio Argüelles, “Argu(ru)”, died Sunday night in a car accident. He was respected as one of the most talented plug-in developers anywhere, as the creator of plug-in house discoDSP, and later a developer of plug-ins for Image-Line. He had a deep role in the creation of FL Studio 7, the sampler DirectWave, and Deckadance.

Some of you probably know more of the details of his work for both discoDSP and Image-Line. If you’d like to share anything about him as a person, or his tools, please do. The tools that developers create are a special thing to all of us in our music and in our creative lives; part of the joy of using software someone else creates is getting to know something of their personality. So, from all the users of his tools and the digital music community, you will truly be missed, Arguru.

Both KVR and our friends at the Spanish-language Hispasonic have running threads of condolences.

Rest in Peace, Arguru [KVR Audio Forum thread]

Fallece Juan Antonio Argüelles, “Arguru” [Hispasonic]

Our condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues, and to his fiancee.

The first response came over the weekend from Adobe’s John Nack on his personal blog, waxing largely philosophical about why it made sense to support the newer Intel Macs instead of the PowerPC platform Apple themselves had abandoned. Now, I’ll be the first to concede Mac users can be hotheaded, but I think the better response would be to cut straight to the technical reasons why Adobe’s developers made this choice. Mac users assume, because they’ve been told so repeatedly by Apple, that creating universal applications is a “checkbox-clicking affair.” You can see a comment to that effect in the extensive discussion Mr. Nack triggered on his site.

Adobe audio product manager Hart Shafer chimes in today with the simpler technical answer:

Soundbooth and PowerPC Chips [Hart's Audition]

Basically, Soundbooth contains lots of Intel-specific code that would be inefficient to port to PowerPC, and the additional QA testing required for an additional CPU architecture was deemed an unworthy investment. (Note that the flipside of this argument would be that, as some Mac users had hoped, Apple’s switch to Intel makes development cheaper for software that’s heavily reliant on the processor, like audio apps.) Now, I’m in no position to evaluate that argument. Since a significant number of our readers are programmers, I’ll let you read his entry and tell us if you think this is a significant issue. What is interesting here is that Shafer never says Adobe’s can’t also port Audition to the Mac. I’m going to keep hoping this is possible; Peak can’t meet everyone’s needs, the excellent Spark is long gone, Apple discontinued their standalone editor product, and I think Mac users would welcome Audition with open arms. In the meantime, I’ll continue enjoy using Audition on my PC.

But, regardless of whether Adobe made the right call here (and it’s their choice to make), there is one conclusion that’s safe to draw here: cross-platform development isn’t always as easy as it might seem. Some newly-coded apps can be easily ported to multiple platforms, although (speaking as someone who routinely runs apps on Mac, Windows, and even Linux side by side) not always with equivalent performance results. Others would be so difficult to port that the time would be wasted. The irony is, the ongoing march of computer technology may mean the easiest way to use software on different platforms is to keep an extra computer handy. (Hint: rescue a computer from someone who’s going to throw it away, repair it, and laugh heartily.)

A post on KVR Audio which appears to be from the Cakewalk beta team suggests that Cakewalk is looking for Mac OS X beta testers:

Cakewalk is looking for OSX Beta Testers [KVR Message Topic]

Cakewalk (aka 12 Tone Systems) is a long-time leading PC/Windows developer, since their founding in the late 1980s. Their early products were DOS-based, but all their flagship, in-house development has been PC-only. Products like Metro have occasionally brought them to the Mac (thanks to that commenter, yes, a fine product I remember well — er, aside from I forgot it), and, briefly, the cross-platform Overture notation software originally developed by Opcode. But they’ve never launched a major product for the Mac.

So, what’s happening on the Mac? If I knew, I’d be under NDA. Unfortunately, the only information I can share would therefore either have to be speculation — or wrong. And, wishful thinking aside, you probably won’t be running Project5 v2 on the Mac any time soon. More likely, as another reader points out, is the Z3TA+ waveshaping synth (pictured), inexplicably pronounced “zay-tah.” Cakewalk got distribution rights from rgc:audio, whose other great plugins have started showing up in products like SONAR. (And, having tried it on Windows, it’s good stuff.)

Huge news? Okay, maybe not. Big news? I still think so, especially if the Mac gets more terrific plugins. And while Cakewalk may not be plotting a Mac move, that doesn’t change the fact that they could. In fact, I’m one of those who thinks they should, if development costs aren’t too high. SONAR would be redundant on a platform that already has DP, Logic, Pro Tools, Live, and other DAWs, but Project5 v2 could be a logical jump. I think the reasons they’re not on the Mac could be more religious than economical — and that could keep them PC loyal for a long time to come. But that’s okay by me. I have to have some reason to keep the PC around.

By the way, on the subject of Metro, that sequencer is still alive:

Metro [Sagan Technology]

. . . Opcode notwithstanding, sometimes discontinued software gets a second lease on life. Now my memory is that Metro was originally not a Cakewalk product, that it’s something they bought (like Overture). Can anyone set me straight?