Pro Tools Free
For those who don't already know, Pro Tools is the most ubiquitous music production software/hardware system today. It was created by Digidesign originally for Mac-based systems only, but has since been ported to the PC. According to its advocates, the main attraction of the system is the hardware real-time effect expandability. It is claimed that software real-time effects can't keep up. Of course, I disagree with this assessment, as does Paul Davis, author of Ardour (a GNU/Linux DAW application). However, this is all besides the point.
Digidesign released a version of their software which does not require their proprietary hardware. It is distributed free of cost, and was creatively named "Pro Tools Free". I assume its purpose was mostly as a demo product; $10,000 is hefty sum to lay down for a product you're unfamiliar with. Anyway, I wanted to use this software to familiarize myself with the Pro Tools interface. It turns out, it's only available for Windows 98, Windows ME, or OS 9.
My understanding is that PTF was released about 7 months after Windows 2000. My question is this; why even bother with production music software on an operating system as completely unstable as Windows 98? And even if it had been released before W2k, it should have been ported by now. If they felt it was worth the bother to make the free application for Windows, they should have spent the extra time to port it to Windows 2000.
Perhaps in retrospect, they decided it wasn't as helpful as they thought it would as a demo application. But even then, they probably should at least have taken down the downloads; I mean, it's embarrassing. Free downloads for Windows 98, ME, and OS 9. They might as well have an all text site that says in big letters, "THOUGH WE PRETEND TO BE GENEROUS, WE AREN'T WITH THE TIMES. PLEASE FORGIVE US".
Digidesign released a version of their software which does not require their proprietary hardware. It is distributed free of cost, and was creatively named "Pro Tools Free". I assume its purpose was mostly as a demo product; $10,000 is hefty sum to lay down for a product you're unfamiliar with. Anyway, I wanted to use this software to familiarize myself with the Pro Tools interface. It turns out, it's only available for Windows 98, Windows ME, or OS 9.
My understanding is that PTF was released about 7 months after Windows 2000. My question is this; why even bother with production music software on an operating system as completely unstable as Windows 98? And even if it had been released before W2k, it should have been ported by now. If they felt it was worth the bother to make the free application for Windows, they should have spent the extra time to port it to Windows 2000.
Perhaps in retrospect, they decided it wasn't as helpful as they thought it would as a demo application. But even then, they probably should at least have taken down the downloads; I mean, it's embarrassing. Free downloads for Windows 98, ME, and OS 9. They might as well have an all text site that says in big letters, "THOUGH WE PRETEND TO BE GENEROUS, WE AREN'T WITH THE TIMES. PLEASE FORGIVE US".