Updated: PreSonus burned the midnight oil to get ready. See bottom.

Word from developers confirms what I had suspected: developers were as surprised as we were to learn Apple was shipping a new operating system on August 30.

If you have to ask yourself whether you want to upgrade, then the simple answer is – don’t, not yet. And via Christopher Wimbrow on Twitter, here’s the first tool that we can confirm will outright break if you jump too soon – PreSonus hardware. From their forum, earlier today, PreSonus’ Nick RICK Naqvi tells a user (unofficially):

Right now, we are planning to have support for Snow Leopard by the end of October. We had originally heard they were going to release it in September, so our plan was to test it thoroughly and then release a new driver about 30 days later. They moved up the date to August 28 so it looks like we will be a little more than a week later than we expected.

Please note, if you update your OS, your PreSonus hardware will not work.

If you have to install it to play with, I’d recommend doing a partition. But leave Leopard on it so that you can continue to record.

Ouch. I’ll let you know if this gets fixed sooner. And remember, this is an operating system that is being tested under a Non-Disclosure Agreement; more incompatibilities are likely to appear next week.

This illustrates a problem, too. Shipping an application early is great news. Shipping an operating system early – with countless hardware and software vendors pulling time from other work (like new features) to keep their stuff working – not so great news.

Fortunately, you have power over your computer. Ignore that Apple email that appeared on Monday saying Snow Leopard is “In store or at your door Friday,” and consider it a bleeding-edge operating system. Assume that for most users, the current build of 10.5 represents the best compromise of Mac stability, compatibility, and features – at least for the time being.

UPDATE – PreSonus WILL have beta drivers. And like the vast majority of vendors, real stable versions are expected in a few weeks.

Earlier in the week, I was told that we weren’t going to have Snow Leopard driver until October, but our engineers worked overtime the last week or so to release a beta driver that is fully functional. We have tested it internally and it is working well and allows for daisychaining of interfaces and full feature functionality. This driver will work with all of our Firestudio Family Interfaces including:

Firestudio 2626
Firestudio Project
Firestudio Lightpipe
Firestudio Tube
Firestudio Mobile
StudioLive1642

Our other interfaces are class compliant and are going to be immediately supported on Snow Leopard:

Firebox
Inspire1394
FP10 / Firepod
AudioboxUSB

Lastly, our new recording software, StudioOne is also ready for Snow Leopard. Here’s a link to the StudioOne page: http://www.presonus.com/products/SoftwareDetail.aspx?SoftwareId=11

If you are an early adopter, let us know your experiences.

Updated: See http://createdigitalmusic.com/snowleopard for a running report.

Apple’s “Snow Leopard” 10.6 ships Friday, which means it’s time to start compiling information about the new OS flavor. Just don’t upgrade too fast, as always.

Want to push an operating system to the breaking point? Ask a musician. Between the demands of real-time performance and the complex ecosystem of mix-and-match hardware, software, and plug-ins, odds are your local audio geek will break an OS faster than anyone else. Not every operating system upgrade is going to have a big impact on music software, but keep in mind that even subtle changes can cause issues that may interfere with your work.

Of course, all of this means music users should treat any OS update with caution. :

• If you’ve got a critical, primary production machine, your best bet is often simply to wait. Confirm that software works before you upgrade rather than after.
• If you’ve got some time to invest in an upgrade or have more than one machine, be sure to do a full backup and system image so you can revert to the previous, known working OS.
• Best solution: Boot off an external hard drive. Don’t commit to installing internally until you’re sure everything is working. Once you are, go enjoy. (as noted in comments, and yes, I should have said this initially… still, the latest 10.5 build is still the preferred OS for now.)

So, sit back. Enjoy life. Go for a walk on a beach. Recline in your favorite chair with your MacBook running Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Isn’t it great? Need to waste time? Plants vs. Zombies is out for Mac.

What? Still want to upgrade?

Fair enough. We’ll be tracking changes to Snow Leopard and which of them may impact audio.

The short version: Snow Leopard introduces only small changes, but if a developer hasn’t been on top of those changes, you could see issues. And as for the 64-bit mode that’s attracting most of the attention, the short answer is, you can’t use it for music yet.

Native Instruments and Plogue have each responded to CDM with information on their software.

“Studio” for many of us means packing musical production tools into a corner of our desk, then being able to fit the whole thing into a backpack and take it with us. It’s bringing along your entire production to a cramped rehearsal room and adjusting tracks in a hotel room. It’s putting together an assortment of unusual pieces of DIY hardware, mobile game systems and an iPod touch, and composing and performing a live PA set. So packing in functionality means a lot.

That makes it worth considering a hardware solution like Cakewalk’s V-Studio 100 in obsessive detail. Combining an interface with mixing, control, recording, and software functions makes the VS especially relevant to the computer musician.

I was one of the first people outside Cakewalk to lay eyes on the V-Studio 100. Part of the initial appeal to me was that it seemed to combine a lot of the tools I wanted into a single package.

Sure, its big brother, the V-Studio 700, is an impressive unit with loads of onboard options. But the V-Studio 100 was more my speed: it has that apartment studio, backpack-friendly attitude. And don’t let the “SONAR” in “SONAR V-Studio 100” fool you, either. While it’s great having a free copy of a special edition of SONAR on Windows you can use the VS hardware and even the plug-in bundle that comes with it on any host on either Windows or Mac. And — oh, yeah – you can also make use of all that audio I/O and mixing to do some crazy stuff with your plugged-in portable game  consoles and iPhones and homebrewed electronics.

The real test is whether this one unit can perform the tasks you need. The V-Studio 100 tries to be a number of different things:

• An audio interface (up to 24-bit/96 kHz)
• A mixer
• A control surface
• A wave recorder
• A software bundle

Correction: The street price of the whole package is US$699. (I had incorrectly put the street at $800 instead of $700!)

Anything that does that much will naturally have to make some compromises. Some of those compromises I think are rather well-conceived on the VS, while others I hope will evolve over time.

This will be partially a review, but partially a description of what it’s like using the VS, so if you do have one of these, I can hopefully give you a sense of how to begin using it.

Osmos Trailer from hemisphere games on Vimeo.

Osmos is a glorious glimpse of the fusion of electronic sound and game design many of us anticipate. It is built around a (challenging!) physics-based gameplay style – in the same vein as float-around-the-world games like flOw (and long before that, Asteroids) with procedural design and a perfect, liquid electronic soundtrack. Osmos became available DRM-free yesterday on Valve’s terrific Steam service for US$10 (on sale for a little less this week), and you can buy worldwide from the developer on Direct2Drive. (The developer has temporarily suspended direct sales from their site. Updated: the game is available again direct from the developer. It’s worth buying direct if you want to get a free coupon for the Mac and Linux licenses when they become available. Steam and D2D are great stores that support indie developers, though, and in the case of Osmos you don’t get any DRM with either one.) There’s also a free demo available. Versions for Mac and Linux are coming soon.

The roster of artists working on the music is simply a dream, including Loscil, Gas/High Skies, Julien Neto, and Biosphere.

I’ve already lost myself in the opening levels, and can’t wait to get deeper. CDM will have an interview with the creators by next week, once they recover from the launch.

And yes, indie gaming looks like a very fertile ground for digital artists and musicians, indeed.

Now, I’m not going to say anything else, because I want some time to play the game.

http://www.hemispheregames.com/osmos/

So, you’ve seen lots of interesting looking iPhone apps, but most of them strike you as gimmicky. Others have interesting workflows, but limit you to working on the mobile device, not switching back to a computer. And maybe you’re perfectly happy with a phone running Windows Mobile or Palm OS.

Enter SunVox. This is not a mobile music making app for the timid. It’s a powerful suite of soundmakers and sequencers, baked together into a modular environment that lets power users tweak to their heart’s delight. It’s small, it’s fast, and it looks – and sounds – a lot like early computer music programs. It’ll run on iPhone now, but also on Palm, Windows Mobile, Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’ll run on your netbook, your MacBook, and your ThinkPad.

Incredibly, all this goodness is yours on all those platforms for ten bucks and on iPhone for $5, easily making SunVox the biggest steal in music software I think I’ve ever seen:

• Flexible architecture that adapts to slow and fast CPUs
• Synths and generators: FM, virtual analog, FFT-based “SpectraVoice”, Kicker
• Effects: Delay, distortion, filters, LFOs, reverb
• Sampler with WAV support
• WAV export when you’re done

http://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

And for fans of computer music in the 90s, it’s a chance to get back to some of the no-nonsense, powerful creation of that era, without some of the distractions you may find in modern apps.