View Single Post
  #1  
Old 12-20-2009, 02:30 PM
Bob Brown's Avatar
Bob Brown Bob Brown is offline
Evergreen Audio Design Group
 
Join Date: Apr 1998
Location: Evergreen, CO
Posts: 257
Default Pro Tools 8.0.3: a developers perspective....

Hi,

I wanted to offer a few thoughts about the Pro Tools 8.0.3 release. I have been working on this release for the past year. It has been fairly challenging for many reasons. I thought I might be able to shed a little light onto the release for those who are interested.

One of the challenges that we always face is a greatly increasing scope of things to support or consider to support while our resources have become more limited than ever. While helping plan and work on this release there were many things to consider. Just the operating systems we had to consider for support is rather daunting. We needed to consider support for Apple's Leopard, Snow Leopard with 32-bit kernel support, and Snow Leopard with 64-bit kernel support. Of course there sre Apple Intel based systems and PPC based systems. We also had to consider support of Windows XP, Vista 32 Vista 64, Windows 7 32-bit, and Windows 7 64-bit.

Now looking at hardware peripherals, we have an ever increasing set that we need to support. Just a few of those are the various generations of our HD cards and peripherals (96, 96i, 192, MIDI, PRE, SYNC, SYNC HD), our control surfaces (ProControl, DControl, DCommand, Command8, Control24), third party control surfaces, LE interfaces (MBox original, MBox2, MBox2 Pro, MBox2 Mini, MBox2 Micro, 002, 003, 11 Rack), M-Audio interfaces (too many to list), Mix peripherals (888/24, 882, 1622), Digidesign Expansion HD chassis, and other third party chassis.

We also support 5 translated languages for each operating system (English, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Korean). Pro Tools also runs on other languages and allows support for all types of characters.

I'm really good at math but my head is starting to hurt trying to think about all of the test cases we need to look at to make sure everything is working properly. What's that... 7 operating systems times 30 plus pieces of hardware times 5 languages!

The Pro Tools 8.0.3 team and Digidesign as a whole had to make decisions on all of these things. None of these were taken lightly. Many involved research from our engineering groups and product management groups to determine the technical feasibility of supporting various configurations and the impact to our users. Unfortunately, we cannot always support all configurations.

As a software engineer, it is always a challenge to keep all of the configurations working properly on all of the operating systems. There are several million lines of code not including all of the plug-ins we build that must be maintained and updated to keep everything working properly. Many times we find that to provide support for a new operating system version, we have to redesign the portions of software to support it. Sometimes this redesign of the software does not easily allow for older versions of the operating system to keep working properly. Sometimes the redesign of the software requires significantly more software engineering and software testing than is possible for a release. This type of problem is one of the primary reasons that we end support for various operating systems or pieces of hardware.

The engineers at Digidesign are always looking for ways to improve the software and the processes we use for developing it. We always want to make it faster and easier for us to create more features, design more hardware, and make cooler products for everyone to use. As a matter of fact, many of the engineers and other employees at Digidesign are musicians and users of Pro Tools. We want it to work just as much as you do.

I'm off to practice my bass and play around with Pro Tools. Thanks for reading!
Reply With Quote