Well, BiaB has its roots as a DOS application that became a Windows application.

So the codebase is pretty firmly planted on the PC.

When choosing to create a Mac application, I suspect that PG Music has a choice: port the existing Windows application to a cross-platform library so that Mac version could share a common codebase, or build the Mac port from scratch.

As far as I know, there weren't very many cross-platform libraries that supplied native look and feel and had excellent audio support.

Moving to a cross-platform library would mean potentially replacing solid, working code with bug-ridden new code that at the end of a long effort might not even work well.

I'm guessing that they decided to build the Mac version from scratch.

But when you build a complex computer program, you don't really build everything "from scratch." Instead, you end up relying on third party tools to supply some of the features.

For example, BiaB uses a third party library to handle audio stretching, which is far superior to what they had before.

Unfortunately, not every library available on the PC platform is available on the Mac. So right there, you're not going to have parity for the two programs. You're not going to remove features from the PC just because you don't have it for the Mac, right?

Then comes the question of which version is going to be the reference platform. You generally don't want to have different features in the applications, so you're going to code them on one platform first.

For reasons already mentioned, it makes sense for the PC to be the reference platform.

Now, not every feature that gets coded makes it out the door. Sometimes changes made to the code break other features in unexpected ways. So it makes sense that features wouldn't be ported to the Mac until they were actually demonstrated to work on the PC. Otherwise, it's twice as expensive when you make a mistake and have to abandon something.

Finally, I'm sure that it's expensive to maintain two separate applications. Someone who's intimately familiar with the Windows API is generally not also a Mac specialist. So it's likely that the Mac coding team is smaller than the PC coding team.

I suspect that there are just a lot of things that make it hard to get the Mac version up to the level of the PC.

None of this is any consolation to a Mac user.

-- David Cuny

My virtual singer development blog
Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?

BiaB 2025 | Windows 11 | Reaper | Way too many VSTis.