In article pNy9d.9$j15.0@trnddc07, Hev wrote:
Scott Dorsey wrote:
Yup. I suggest interning at a studio with Pro Tools and seeing the same
sort of thing going on. Either you do proper preventative maintenance, or
you live with stuff falling apart all around you. There are a lot of
studios,
both digital and analogue, in that last category.

Good advice, I certainly would gain from that experience. All the experience
I have had with digital recording systems have been pretty stable once
operating systems have been 'tuned' for pro audio use. That is not to say
issues won't occur when adding new hardware or software.

In the short term, they are all very stable. In the long term, you either
do maintenance, or you do repairs.

And when you get behind the repair curve, things start snowballing. One of
the things about analogue gear, though, is that most failures (other than
power supply failures) aren't catastrophic. You can lose one channel or
lose one output and still keep functioning. This is an advantage in the
short term because it lets you work around problems, but it's a disadvantage
in the long term because it makes it that much more tempting to ignore them.

With more modular digital systems coming down the pike, hopefully digital
gear is going to be this way too. The Neve Capricorn is one example of
a nicely distributed system... you can lose big chunks and still keep
operating.

So who are the players that have created custom operating systems for audio?
Is there a proprietory pro audio operating system? If there isn't there
should be...

As far as I know, BeOS is pretty much the only player there, and aside from
getting embedded in the Mackie recorders, I don't know how much real market
share they have. There are some small realtime operating systems out there
like pSOS and the like; dbx has their own proprietary kernal that they have
embedded in their standalone dsp boxes. But I don't think any of these really
have much market share, which is a lot of the problem. I think dedicated
operating systems would do more to improve the long-term stability of
computerized audio gear than anything else.

Scott... I'm on the east coast in the DC area. I know they have cicadas
elsewhere in the country... what part of the country are you in to have the
privilege of dealing with the red eyed buggers?

I'm in Williamsburg, about three hours south of you and Mike Rivers.
To be honest, we didn't get anywhere near the cicada population here that
my wife got up in Beltsville. It was really amazing up there.
--scott
--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."