Rain Recording make audio-ready notebooks – that is, they’re pre-tested to function well with audio software, with Windows tweaks, driver selection, and configuration all chosen and tested for music and visual production, and no crapware installed. They’re one of a handful of music-friendly vendors that does that (see also: PCAudioLabs, etc.). Given that the PC music making experience can range from awesome to awful depending on which hardware and (particularly) drivers you’re on, that’s no small matter.

Rain has always styled themselves a premium brand. But the latest Diablo really does go to extremes spec-wise. It’ll cost you – base price starts at US$4000, though that’s not as high-end as these sort of desktop specs commanded more recently. Intel and AMD/ATI really are economizing, even at the high end. But cost aside, this machine really maxes out components. You have to admire the results:

• Quad CPUs: up to 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Quad 12MB/1066 MHz “Montevina” Centrino 2 — the most powerful brain you can put in a laptop right now
• Up to 8 GB DDR3 RAM (and if you boot a 64-bit operating system like Vista x64 or – cough – Linux, you can use all of it)
• ATI Radeon MR HD3870/512M DDR3 RAM — just about the most powerful GPU (and some people do prefer ATI to NVIDIA), giving you up to two discrete GPUs
• 17″ display at 1920×1200
• Optional dual 320GB 7200RPM SATA drives with 16MB cache
• 1x eSATA, 3X USB2, 3xFireWire (yeah, you read that right – one onboard FireWire, plus two more using a bundled, TI chipset PCI ExpressCard that pops into that slot, also standard on the lower-cost LiveBook)
• 1 x HDMI, 1 x VGA, card reader, headphone out, mic in, gigabit RJ45 Ethernet, fingerprint scanner

The key specs, of course, are the quad CPU, that ATI GPU, and the maxed-out-res 17″ display. Given those specs, the weight actually isn’t all that bad – 8 lbs. with the 12-cell battery (which you’re going to want, as this machine is likely to suck up electricity in a hurry).

You can put audio on a dedicated chipset (the TI, which isn’t currently available from Apple). You can run two drives in RAID-0, or opt for solid-state drives (which have been improving in performance and value at a pretty impressive rate). And the ATI chipset means this is a pretty powerful visualist / visual production workstation – that also happens to be faster than a lot of high-end gaming laptops, for your off-hour enjoyment..

This is usually the point where someone says, “but do I need all that power to –”

No. You don’t. This is a bit like buying a souped-up supercar — and likely to be about as fuel-efficient. You might “need” this if you want to play Crysis between Pro Tools sessions. (I’ll let you bend the definition of “need” there.) That’s not to say you won’t get a lot of performance out of this, though, and it’s nice to know you have this option if you want it. The GPU only really impacts visuals at the moment, but with the push to do more processing on the GPU, that could change soon even for audio.

Actually, maybe the reason Rain keeps misspelling the GPU as “discreet” is that you can “discreetly” buy one of these and hope your significant other / the IRS / your conscience doesn’t notice you just bought a killer gaming rig as your (ahem) pro audio machine.

For mere mortals, I like the $1999-base-price LiveBook from Rain. It actually gives you a fair amount of this performance, all of the same I/O specs, and compares favorably on specs against Apple’s rival (including offering some serious FireWire and expansion the Apple lacks). And, incidentally, it isn’t a bad gaming machine, either, in case you want to join some of the CDMers the next time they fire up Left 4 Dead.

I do find all of this interesting, though, on two points. One, if any had doubts that you could buy a pre-configured PC and know that it’ll work reliably on audio tasks, Rain ought to put those doubts to rest. I’ve tested the previous Diablo and LiveBook, and out of the box they were ideal audio machines – no tweaks required. It’s absolutely possible to build or buy a mainstream PC that does that, but the luxury of knowing someone at the other end has actually tried running Ableton Live and SONAR sure is nice. (Heck, that’s not necessarily true of Apple – as people found out the hard way during some buggy early releases of Leopard, happily since fixed.)

This also demonstrates that said PC vendors don’t have to fall behind the “enthusiast” custom builders who cater to gamers – if you want to push the envelope on your laptop for audio and visuals and not just games, you can do that, too.

I certainly know not everyone can — or should — spend $4 grand and up on this particular machine. But just like that supercar, it’s sort of nice to know it’s there. And hopefully it can start to serve as a wake-up all that there are communities pushing their PC to the bleeding edge who aren’t primarily gamers.

Diablo Product Page [Rain Recording]

Diablos don’t hang around long, but I do hope to get my hands on a current-generation Rain soon; stay tuned.

Apple’s airtight secrecy has allowed it to do some wonderful things. But what happens when it’s difficult to tell the path of future operating systems? That’s the situation I’m trying to tackle with Mac OS X Leopard and now the upcoming Mac OS X “Snow Leopard.” The good news is, Apple says they’re focused on improving the "quality" of the OS. The bad news is, it’s not clear what the plan is for the existing 10.5 OS — or what it will take for OS changes to sync up with what we need as musicians and audio producers.

Current Leopard Changes: Still Some Bumps for Audio

First, let’s talk about the existing Mac OS X Leopard release. Leopard audio performance does seem to be gradually improving. (See our previous reports.) But we’re still hearing reports of regular issues, particularly now with FireWire devices (10.5.3 addressed at least some USB problems). These may indeed be affecting a minority of users, and many of you have no problem at all. But that doesn’t change the reality that they’re problems introduced by upgrading to 10.5 from 10.4. Whether Apple, the device vendor, or some combination has to fix the problem, it’s obviously something you’ll want fixed. And in a supreme irony, I can actually set up a more predictable Vista system for music right now than Leopard.

I was recently forwarded a message from a major pro audio developer. The message encouraged their development partners to test Leopard extensively. I can’t divulge the contents of that email, but I can point to two changes in 10.5 that could be related to at least some of the audio performance issues people are experiencing. (This stuff is complex, so please feel free to correct me here, particularly if you know something about, say, kernel programming.)

The significant changes are:

• Multi-core thread scheduling: Leopard changes the way the OS handles thread scheduling on multiple-core systems. Thread persistence helps keep threads “glued” to specific cores, which should improve performance. The issue is, anything that changes the way threads are handled in the kernel can have an impact on digital audio. That isn’t to say the fault is always Apple’s if you are having trouble; these kind of changes can reveal issues in other code. But without assuming that this is related to all the glitches people are having with Leopard – since symptoms like clicks, pops, and dropouts can have a host of causes – it is possible that some of the bumps in Leopard are related to this change. (See Apple’s multicore feature page for Leopard.)
• Memory changes: I’ve had less luck tracking this down, but at least one difference is that Leopard adds memory randomization, a security measure intended to prevent exploits by locating system libraries to random locations. Memory randomization is present by default on Windows Vista, but on Leopard it seems as though it may extend to system libraries and driver loading, whereas on Vista it’s something you a programmer has to manually flag to use. I’m not convinced this is actually impacting audio on Leopard, but it does demonstrate that security concerns in operating systems in general can cause significant changes, something we have to watch as audio users.

It’s not clear what the exact impact on audio is; if anyone knows and would like to share your own experience, please do.

The thread scheduling issue appears to be more significant to music and audio. Because audio tasks happen in real time, thread scheduling is vitally important. Of course, the long-term payoff could be better multi-core performance, which is something audio fans are likely to like. The issue is the intermediate time when you’re ironing out bugs. And that brings us to the mysterious Snow Leopard.

Snow Leopard: SP1?

Fairly or not, some Mac fans are already grumpily referring to Snow Leopard as  Leopard “Service Pack 1.” (If you’re a Windows user, let me explain: the highest insult to a Mac fan is basically to compare something to Windows. Don’t ever call a Mac fan’s mother “Millenium Edition” unless you’re itching for a fight.)

Making all of this worse was this statement from the press release:

“Rather than focusing primarily on new features, Snow Leopard will enhance the performance of OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future OS X innovation.”

Now, personally, I reacted as many people do – stopping adding new features and focusing on improving what’s there sounds great! It raises just two problems: first, if Snow Leopard is “focusing on quality,” what was Leopard focused on? Second, Apple calls this the “next major version” of Leopard, which usually means they’re charging for it. Microsoft, by contrast, doesn’t charge for Service Pack releases even when (as with XP’s SP1 and SP2) they do introduce new features.

I’m not actually so concerned about either of those questions, though. I think all three operating systems — Linux and Windows included — could stand to spend a little time focusing entirely on performance and reliability rather than adding eye candy and gimmicks. I’m even happy to pay for it — maybe even more so than other improvements. The issue to me is planning and wondering what happens with Leopard in the meantime.

That’s made more puzzling by the "new features" in Snow Leopard:

• Multicore improvements
• 64-bit for support up to 16TB of RAM
• QuickTime X, a new version of QuickTime
• OpenCL, a new library for running CPU processes on the GPU (GPGPU)
• Microsoft Exchange support

See: Mac OS X Snow Leopard (Client OS page)

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? If in fact Snow Leopard really is just a "quality" release, why not skip Leopard and go straight to Snow Leopard? (This seems even more tempting than the Vista/Windows 7 split, especially as Vista 7 likely is a feature release and because Microsoft usually rolls out fixes directly in addition to putting them in bigger OS updates.)

OpenCL, QuickTime X, and the Exchange support are just libraries, so we can safely ignore them. It does raise the question of why Apple would roll these into an OS release, although that makes me suspect this will be a free, not a paid, upgrade, or that perhaps QuickTime X will be back-ported to Leopard and available on Windows. (Well, one would hope.)

But the multicore mention is a bit odd, because that was supposed to be what happened with Leopard. This could imply that Leopard’s multicore improvements weren’t fully baked before they went out the door. Of course, it could also mean that Leopard will continue to build on what’s Leopard.

Then again, that’s the fundamental problem: we don’t know. Apple keeps all of their OS development under NDA. Developers who don’t make the trip to WWDC may miss out on information entirely. And Apple is unlikely to communicate to the rest of us until the day Snow Leopard ships, whenever that is (since the pricing and schedule haven’t been announced). In fact, part of the reason I can talk about this at all is that I’m not at WWDC. Otherwise, I might have Apple legal knocking on my door.

Maybe I don’t "need to know" what’s going on. But my plea to Apple, if they happen to be listening, would be to coordinate closely when multicore improvements like thread scheduling can impact audio. I get the sense that this really wasn’t in sync on Leopard.

And of course, this whole issue isn’t unique to the Mac. Windows developers are in a similar boat, wondering what the plan is for Vista as Microsoft shifts its efforts to its own release, Windows 7. Like Snow Leopard, Windows 7’s features are vague, the plan is for "quality" and performance over new functionality and big changes, and it’s not clear how much energy is going into the current versus the future OS — especially as Microsoft tries to make its release schedule more prompt. Bizarrely, Cupertino and Redmond have each adopted parallel strategies.

A Better Way?

I’ll point it out again: as much credit as Apple has rightfully gotten for OS quality, their approach does have some significant downsides.

• New computers ship out with the latest and greatest, whether or not it’s stable for the particular task the user has in mind.
• Operating systems ship out blending various updates, from features for iPhone users to hardware fixes to critical security patches to iTunes updates to new features. There’s no granular control over what gets installed, which is sometimes necessary to maintain a stable system.
• Apple’s "whole widget" philosophy sometimes causes them to compete with themselves. QuickTime updates get tied to improvements in iTunes, for instance — even if some of us use QuickTime for critical professional work and don’t touch iTunes.
• Apple’s "everything’s a secret" approach makes it really hard to plan or fully understand what’s going on.

I do think Apple deserves their reputation for the work they do in software. So I’d really like to see some improvement. I’d like an OS upgrade mechanism that gives us more control. I think Apple could better document changes, and shift some of the knowledge that now is covered under restrictive NDAs to a more public sphere so that it’s easier for people to document and fix problems — many of which involve third parties but reflect poorly on the quality of the Mac platform.

And you do still have a choice in OS. Yes, even including Linux.

The Pro Tools HD 7.3.1 cs3 update can be installed over Pro Tools HD 7.3 or Pro Tools HD 7.3.1, and includes all updates that were previously made available in the 7.3.1, 7.3.1cs1 and 7.3.1cs2 releases. Pro Tools HD 7.3.1 cs3 is currently available as a free download for registered Pro Tools HD 7.3 users. For details visit the Digidesign support web page at: www.digidesign.com/support.

Given that Digidesign built their business on taking processing off the CPU and onto dedicated DSP hardware, it is pretty funny that they’re now pushing native processing — even if Pro Tools itself still benefits from enhanced computing power. That said, is there really anything stopping Digi from going native somewhere down the road? (Speaking of which, where’s the LE support, which would actually run native on these cores?) Either way, it’s nice to see Digi being aggressive in this space. Fully supporting additional cores does actually require some effort on the part of the developer. It’ll be interesting to see if all these extra cores can really benefit real-world situations. In the meantime, I find even a lower-end dual-core Intel chip — even on a laptop — to be plenty luxurious for music production, which is really good news for mobile music creation or going digital on a budget.

For all the talk of Apple needing to create a Pro Tools killer, though, this should remind you again that Apple wins either way. Even as Windows has made inroads in the audio market, Pro Tools users still lean Mac. Want Logic? Apple will sell you a computer. Want Pro Tools? Apple will sell you a computer. Want Ableton Live? Max/MSP? Ardour? Live coding in ChucK? Apple will … you get the idea. Plenty of PC musicians out there (I’m one of them, about half of the time), but Apple has a lucrative market in music creation. Nice to reflect on that, given at one point the company was in such trouble it looked like music might get jettisoned altogether. Apple can remain cozy with Avid, even as direct competitors.