[AvidCS]

Hi All,

I'm David Gibbons, the VP of product marketing for Digidesign. I'm happy to offer an interim update on this issue (we'll ensure it gets cross-posted to other relevant threads too).

Since before our general manager Dave Lebolt's post in early April, we've been working in a very focused way on completing Leopard support. In fact, it has been our #1 priority as a company. We have placed no limits on the resources we're willing to apply to this task < every person capable of helping to resolve the issues is actively working on it every day. A few posters on the DUC have noticed that we intro'ed a public beta of a virtual instrument plug-in called ³Transfuser² this week, and some have speculated that we were spending time and resources on something that is not consequential < that Leopard compatibility is way more important... I want to reassure everyone that Transfuser was in development far before the Leopard issues came to light, and is developed by a separate R&D group based in Germany: the Digidesign ³A.I.R.² (Advanced Instrument Research) group.
These guys are dedicated to making virtual instruments only, and unfortunately their skillset can't add anything to fixing the operating system-related issues we're experiencing with Leopard, other than ensuring their plug-ins are Leopard compatible (believe me, we asked them!).

So how is it coming along? Well, together with Apple we have fixed almost all the outstanding bugs at this point, and expect to be able to provide another update very soon with details of the actual ship date. We're cautiously confident of beating the schedule Dave outlined. In fact, I wish that we could simply give you our best guess at the release date right now, but we want to be sure of the exact target date (very soon) so that you folks won¹t have any surprises.

I'd also like to say that we really understand and empathize with the annoyance and frustration being expressed on this thread: we take it very seriously when we can't deliver a fully compatible version of Pro Tools to any section of our user base, and consider meeting the needs of LE users to be vital to our long term ability to keep making cool audio software. So feel free to keep voicing these concerns loudly, and look out for another update from either Dave L. or me in the very near future.

David Gibbons

VP Product Marketing