Cheshire Omnimedia

Forums are buzzing over the Waves recent dropping of their APA product line. A quick look at their website reveals that all evidence of the thing is gone.

What does this mean? Native processing is here in a big way. People have been running native for quite some time, but I think with quad-core processing and multi-gig ram we’ve gotten to the point where we can’t max out our processors.

Literally, the state of the business is such that processing has far outstripped needs for audio production. Of course we’ll have more elaborate algorithms in our plugin’s (TDM Tubetech is quite a beast, for example) but we’ve fallen behind Moore’s law.

At the house of Digi is where things get interesting. For the uninitiated, their HD line uses proprietary pci/pci-e cards and separate rack interfaces for I/O. There’s low-latency processing on the cards using custom chips (TDM). You can use their usual native RTAS plugins like in their LE series.

Digi’s I/O plan will probably stay the same. Dedicated cards will feed I/O boxes, but I suspect the days of TDM might be numbered. It’ll take a few years, and most likely the next Protools HD line (which we’re waaaaay overdue for and will likely ship in the next nine months) will still have TDM processing.

It’s just that it shouldn’t.

Gearslutz bemoan Waves APA

Tags: HD, Rtas, TDM, Waves, Waves APA

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Protools, Rumor, The Future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.