Apple G4; Artmatic; USB MIDI Interfaces; MOTU

Martin Russ laments his unerring success at buying new Macs just as they are about to be superseded, but recovers enough to find another little‑known but fascinating seam of music software.

When I first bowed to the inevitable and bought a PowerMac, I weighed everything up carefully, and bought at the leading edge, just as you are supposed to. For a few weeks the 200MHz 7300 was at the top of the Mac heap, and I got a warm feeling knowing that having several times the standard cache was getting me an extra few percent in speed.

Nature may abhor a vacuum, but computer development seems to hate contentment. In my case, the 'same casing but miles faster' beige G3 Macs were gleefully announced just a few weeks after my 7300 arrived. Now I'm not a 'leading‑edge' chaser, and I've taken my time changing Operating Systems (most of my work is still done using MacOS 7.6.1, and it's only because the recently acquired 'Blue & White' G3 came with MacOS 8.6 that I've discovered how similar and yet different it is; without the push, I suspect that I'd still be a pure System 7 user), but I'd really have appreciated just a little longer at the front of the race.

And, of course, despite all the rumours saying that they would arrive late this year, or early next year, the new G4 Macs were announced just a few weeks after I bought my G3. My computer‑buying timing is beginning to look like more than just an accident. Once I could laugh off, but twice?

G4

ArtMatic: where sound and pictures meet, mix and mingle.

The G4's PowerPC 7400 processor chip may add only an extra 0 to the 740 chip used in the G3 machines, but there's a number of significant changes which mark this as the fourth generation of PowerPC processors. The change which you will hear most about is the Velocity Engine, which is marketing‑speak for a parallel‑processing influenced vector processing unit which is specifically designed to give a speed bump to the complex repetitive calculations that you find always quoted as being used in 'graphics and video' applications (the high‑end G4s will apparently do the MPEG decoding of their DVDs in software, not in a hardware accelerator!), and which computer‑using musicians might recognise as being the province of audio processing too.

The catch is that software writers will need to actually upgrade their applications to take advantage of the extra power offered by the Velocity Engine — this could involve a recompile, or in some cases, it might just require a new plug‑in or extension. This sort of reworking shouldn't take too long, and by the beginning of next year we should see a lot of applications with little 'Velocity Engine‑accelerated' stickers. Bitheadz are already working on optimising their Retro AS1 software synth and Unity DS1 virtual sampler, with an anticipated doubling of polyphony. Optimised versions of their Voodoo virtual drum machine and Black & Whites virtual piano will follow. Other things that will help the G4s be annoyingly fast will be the improved data transfer between the RAM and the processor, as well as improvements to the 100MHz system buss — which can now reach bandwidths of up to 800 Megabits per second, according to Apple's figures.

The iMac saw Apple's big move from beige cases to full colour, a trend which the 'Blue & White' G3s continued. My 'Blue & White' G3 does clash slightly with a studio in which the accent colour is scarlet against the black ash, grey and white theming. So my own colour went decidedly green when the glassy clear casing of the G4s was announced, especially with the much more neutral 'Charcoal' as the 'colour'.

By the time you read this, the 450 and 500MHz variants of the G4 should be out. Some cynics have taken great delight in pointing out that the 450MHz G4 actually has a G3 motherboard (the Yosemite PCB) and was available when the G4 was announced, whilst the faster models have a new PCB (the muscially‑apt Sawtooth!) and won't be available until around the time you read this. The new board has a number of little nuances that won't make much difference to musicians, like a 2x AGP slot (with a 4x in the next increment, perhaps?), but there are some which might be significant. These include a maximum RAM of 1.5 Gigabytes (I can remember when that would have been a big hard drive!), two separate 12 Mbits per second USB busses with dedicated buss controller chips, and an internal Firewire connector for internal Firewire drives. For musicians who want to fill the internal hard drive bays with storage, the Ultra ATA/66 interface should give twice the burst‑mode data transfer rate of that on the Yosemite boards.

The future can often be predicted by observing the past. My thinking is that the Yosemite‑boarded 450 model will be phased out sometime next year, when the headlining 550 or 600MHz model is released. I can't see there being a musician‑friendly 'more than 3 PCI slots' model, I'm afraid, not now that USB and FireWire are going to provide peripheral access for 'ordinary' users (who still seem to be graphics professionals with a huge appetite for RAM, screen size and processing speed). For musical use, then, a 'fast‑and‑wide' SCSI card is probably still your answer, perhaps with a PCI expansion chassis too, and a quad serial port card for MIDI. Perhaps it would be worth giving a nudge to Apple to remember that just increasing processing power and OS complexity does not always improve the timing of real‑time asynchronous communications protocols like MIDI. But musical use is not Mac‑mainstream...

Macintoshes have always had yearly cycles, with new releases often just incrementing processor clock speeds, and with major technology changes coming every few years. The gap of barely nine months between 'Blue & White' G3 and 'Charcoal & Grey' G4 suggests that this timing is accelerating — but actually, the G3 was around in a beige form long before see‑thru became the fashion, and this time we are seeing an existing case being reworked around a new processor.

There are a number of techniques which can help to give you advance warning of the ideal time to buy a new Mac. Watch out for price drops, amazing bundle deals, denials of any imminent releases, and so on. But in my experience there's a much better indicator — when I buy a Mac, you can be certain that it will be rapidly followed by something faster for the same price or less. So, since I've no intention of buying a G4 for some time...

Desktop Weaponary

U&I software: a little off the beaten track, perhaps, but well worth the detour...

Under US law, anyhting capable of one gigaflop (billions of floating‑point processing operations per second) is classified as a weapon, and thus is not available for export to countries like Cuba or Libya. Unsurprisingly, there's now a wonderful Apple US TV advert with tanks and the characteristic white background that you find in all the company's adverts these days. Although the one gigaflop threshold was originally intended to prevent supercomputers from being exported, don't forget that today's supercomputers are measured in teraflops, which are thousands of gigaflops. But when was the last time anyone turned down an advertising opportunity?