1. RealBand is Powertracks Pro,(Beefed up) and Norm, who wrote it was not really a pg music employee, but sold his software for a few bucks and eventually his software was included for free. This was in the era that there was no compiler to update or change Band in a Box for the Mac. And as the code was years of work, in a language of development that they had no desire to ditch, it languished. To my knowledge Norm never saw the need to spend the time to port his software, I stand to be corrected on the issue.

2. Given the market, (check the number of users each time you come on and where they are it's like 60 to 2, or 80 to 4..I've never seen 10 people at a time on the Mac forum.) I believe Norm, who controls those products, has decided that given the lack of help from Mother Apple, who contend that Garage Band does what RealBand does probably are not interested in having him port his product. Remember that unlike writing an application for a PC where you can go buy a compiler and development environment from Amazon, you need far more to be able to port to Mac. And your chance of sales are?

3. PGmusic has NEVER in all the years from Atari up, announced the next version is in the works. You can guess, you can pray, you can spy, but you don't know. Imagine a small company with a dozen employees hoping to finish development, alpha testing, beta testing and poduct release for March 1, but having last minute problems that take a month or two to solve. Now imagine the cash flow problem. That's not good business. I doubt you'll find any company in the end user software business, with the exception of games, ever does that. And in the gaming industry they have tallied up the present version, discounted it, and started a marketing effort to ramp up the new product, which is already done testing, is working, and is waiting for some fools to line up 2 days before launch while the company pays media people to send cameras to the stores to see some flunkies in New York who are probably paid by said company to sit in a tent awaiting the version they have to have. Trust me, I ran the media manipulation (I mean education) program at work, you don't think the $20 a piece half sandwich and trip to the bar after were a fluke eh?

So
1. It costs more to make a Mac version.
2. They don't get development help,but rather the opposite.
3. The Mac version may not work at all on the next Mac system, which might be granddaughter of Lisa.
4. PG Music is playing catch up on the Mac issue, while trying to stay in business selling to the larger market.

These, being user forums, are often not read by the management of PGmusic, unless it's the wishlist forum. That being said, Peter and Oliver Gannon, along with some of the staff, go through the wishlist every few months and post comments on suggestions.

As far as corporate policies, Pg music has stayed in business since the first platform was an Atari. Millions of others have fallen by the wayside.

As to the cost of producing the Mac version, supporting it, and developing it, we must imagine the margins are pretty slim.

I have not tested the latest version for PC on my wife's netbook. I see that same netbook for 229$ with Win 7 now. I ran fine on the previous version, and was better than that on jukebox with frozen tracks.

Now, back to evaluating video editing software (free) for Linux on my old Sony Laptop. Just some minor sync issues with the audio, and I need a title editor. (or move it at this stage to Pinnacle..)

NOTE: At 7 a.m. Sunday, 40 users..1 in the Band in a Box Mac forum.

Note2: Avid resellers sold HP boxes with dual monitor cards, Raid Hard Drives, running Windows 2000. To have a working system they built it, tested it, delivered it, and did the initial training. The aftermarket thing we did was to chain the DVD writers so we could render a batch of training videos for weekly distribution to every fire station in the city. Leave it run overnight.

But for fun I was at the Tv station and they let me edit my interview and were blown away by the fact I figured it out on the fly. I never told them that their system looked the same as mine, but I know they paid about 250 k for it, and that it ran on some 12 machines in the production studio. Some higher end graphic stuff, but the same basic system. I confessed later.

Last edited by John Conley; 12/20/10 05:16 AM.
John Conley
Musica est vita