Somebody needs to invent a DAW that is not based on faulty PCs and far from perfect Macs. One that runs its own plug-ins, and does not crash on you ever. So like a new dedicated unit meant for a DAW. But then I guess theres Pro Tools HD.
After I read the first post I immediately thought of the Radar too, especially since it uses the BeOS for the operating system. My friend has one and I've worked on it doing its OS upgrades and network connectivity, and I always thought the use of the BeOS was interesting...
I remember reading many years ago somewhere that 'if you want to really see what you hardware can do with audio/video, try the BeOS', so I downloaded an evaluation and was completely blown away by how efficiently it handled multiple video/audio data streams (this was on a Pentium/Pentium II machine; I can't recall exactly which).
At that time, if you ran a single Winamp lo-res video in Windows (I was running '98 at the time), even if you opened a desktop folder the video would stutter...'98 could never stream anything without stuttering if you performed any other tasks.
But the BeOS on the same hardware was a freak show. I recall opening up a couple of videos, and a few audio streams, all at the same time, while starting Control Panel items, folders, programs just to beat on the machine. None of the streams stuttered, ever...you could just tell that something under the OS hood was doing an efficient job of moving large amounts of data, controlling hardware, multi-tasking, threading, etc.
I was so floored I had to demo it for a few other techs/muscians, all of whom were truly amazed at watching multiple video streams that never, ever would stutter. I'd never seen smoother multi-media performance on a PC platform, and certainly didn't think my hardware was actually capable of the performance it was delivering.
It seemed like you had an instant, exponential increase in your PC's processing power and bus speed; it was that dramatic I found.
I did make the BeOS keel over and start stuttering/slowing, but I had some absurd amount of video/audio streams playing back, far more than you'd ever use in practise. It was interesting to watch the OS 'take it' as I clicked on .avi and .wav files over and over until it fell over the cliff. It took a lot...
It's too bad the BeOS didn't get traction. With todays hardware it would be amazing, and to have seen it 'done right' a long time ago I get a sense that, all these years later, the mainstream OS flavors still don't run your hardware as well as they could. Multimedia efficiency was a design goal of the BeOS, and I have to say again it was eye-opening at how well it worked on the hardware of the time.
