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I wouldn't use the rather inflammatory phrase "stuck up", but it basically comes down to a business decision: is it less expensive to pay TrollTech a multi-thousand dollar fee, or to get the necessary functions implemented without using Qt? For my company, the Qt was by far the cheaper, better option. Our Qt license paid for itself in the first year. We now have an app that runs well on every major platform, that was straightforward to write and is easy to maintain. Using a cheaper, less well-designed GUI toolkit would probably have doubled our development time, and coding our own portable GUI toolkit from scratch would have made things ten times harder. (of course making our app GPL would have given us the best of both worlds... but I couldn't quite convince management of that ;^))

(Not associated with TrollTech, just a satisfied customer)

Okay, okay, I'll talk! :^) In our live-audio mixing application, we like to be able to right-drag from one fader to another to copy the source fader's state to the target fader. (Left-drag doesn't work because left-drag is used to move the fader thumb up and down). This mechanism works fine under BeOS, Windows, and X11, but under OS/X a right-drag immediately aborts and TrollTech tells us there is nothing they can do about it, because the Carbon D&D API doesn't support right-drag. So our poor Mac users are stuck holding down the control key while dragging, and complaining that our app is inconsistent across platforms...

One day the show operators called our tech support to tell us that the BeBox was acting a bit sluggish (BeOS, as you may know, is normally quite snappy). On his next visit, our tech took a look inside the case, and found that the fan responsible for cooling one of the two PowerPC 603 CPUs had stopped turning, causing that CPU to overheat and desolder itself from its socket. The BeBox had survived the self-destruction (and self-extraction) of a CPU and continued to run shows for nearly a week without complaint.

The other story involves a piece of hardware surviving impalement on a forklift fork and continuing to function with no apparent ill effects...

The individual throughput this chip has is good enough for each unit, and the more processing we can do on the audio, the better. We've already looked at this product, however, and determined that until it is available and selling well for 1 year we can't trust the company to not disappear.

Because of that, we usually end up with a design that has a slower DSP with a longer shelf life and from a company such as Motorola or Texas Instruments that documents errata's very well...

--jeff++

1. I get to use the same code for my own 'side projects', and will get to use it even after I leave the company. I'll never have to rewrite it! :^)
   
2. Having the public see my code encourages me to keep it in tip-top shape, as a matter of pride
3. The code now functions as a public resume for my skills (better than a resume, because it is actual proof, not just my say-so)
4. Other people help me debug :^)

I realize this post mostly just reiterates the parent post, but from the opposite directions.... but I have to say, I'm very happy with the situation.

The Radar24 mixing console runs BeOS.
Tascam's SX-1 mixing console runs BeOS.
Level Control Systems has been using BeOS to control their system for a long time
(it was used for the Nagano winter olympics opening ceremoney, various Broadwar shows and the Hollywood Bowl, for example).

Yes

Level Control Systems Matrix 3 has a embedded linux ppc system with 100baseT and UW-SCSI for real time audio system.

--jeff

It looks very much like this is an open source re-implementation of cobranet which is a closed source per-audio-channel license fee system used in existing installations at Tokyo Disney Seas

This is very exciting and goes far beyond just putting an ethernet connector on a guitar.

It is not just streaming audio - synchronized sample clocks are the hardest part about a system like this, since you can and do have multiple transmitters that need to be sample synchronous. That is why they have to use a 'modified' ethernet protocol.

Take a look at Level Control Systems for the type of existing high end audio DSP gear that works with cobranet.

disclaimer: I work with Level Control Systems --jeff

• At least one of the major shipping companies (FedEx, Postal Service, or UPS, I can't recall) has a special 'shock' detector option. It's basically a little vial stuck onto (or inside?) the package that has well known properties, and if it's broken by the time the package arrives, they'll pay for damages.

At Level Control Systems we had many problems with very expensive boxes being delivered trashed. We used the little red 'shock detectors'. Trouble is that they would almost ALWAYS turn red, indicating too much shock. So we stopped using them.

We ended up just designing and packaging the equipment better. Used a powerful shake table to shake the cr*p out of it at different resonant frequencies. It was amazing watching the tight screws loosen and fly off. And DRAM modules too! Once we changed the design so it survived the shake table and when we made better packing we had much fewer problems with shipping.

Almost all PC's and Mac's are not designed to these industrial standards.

It still doesn't help though when they pierce your shipment with a forklift, though. I doubt the LCS boxes would have survived what these boxes went through.

--jeff

Disney is using Level Control System's "Matrix3" audio processing engine to achieve their sound automation. Sound control doesn't get better than the Matrix3.

Website at [LCS Audio].

I can probably answer a number of questions about the sound system, if anyone is curious. If I can't answer them directly, I can get the info in fairly short order.

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