Pro Tools and Leopard

Question

Just wanted to know if anyone had heard any information about Digidesign patching up Pro Tools to work with Leopard.
I really hope they do it soon...

Answer 1

I just got this info from Digidesign on LE and Leopard.
Hello Everyone,
I'm Dave Lebolt, general manager of Digidesign. I wanted to take a moment to talk to you about what is happening with Mac OS X Leopard and support in Pro Tools. Some of you have commented that getting Leopard qualified far earlier than now would seem like a "no-brainer," or that Digidesign is often far too late in coming on line in support of newer OS versions. Some have hypothesized that we will charge for an upgrade just to offer you Leopard support. Some people have even said that it's possible that Apple may be causing problems for Pro Tools on purpose. And some folks have said all of these things at once!
The first thing I want to say to all of you is: I'm sorry. I'm sorry that getting here is taking so long and that we have not been able to communicate more about it, and also because we really do care about your experience as customers... People working here are passionate about Pro Tools, a lot of us here want to use our product with Leopard too, and most of all we care because we genuinely want to do anything we can to help you be creative and successful in what you do. So I'm sorry if we're letting you down by not getting things released sooner.
Lack of Leopard support across our product line affects many of you (and affects our business), so I wanted to give you some insight into what's been happening and where we are in the process. Some quick answers to the above statements:
* We have an excellent working relationship with Apple. I have regular communications with senior folks there, as do many others in our organization with their peers (especially engineering and test). The people I talk to at Apple want Pro Tools to be compatible as much as we do; they know that a lot of you are our mutual customers. Ultimately, Apple considers Digidesign to be an important developer on the platform.
* Rest assured, we will not charge Pro Tools 7.4 owners for an update to support OS X Leopard. In fact, it is not our policy (nor has it ever been) to charge for a "dot release" where the only change is support for a new OS version.
* We'd love to have the new Leopard compatible version out to all of you, and it's very painful not to have it for everyone right now. We start work on the qualification (and development process as required) early in the cycle. We begin work on the "seed" versions of the operating system as soon as they are available and sometimes things are changing even as the initial OS release goes to market. If anything changes after that (i.e., a dot release), we sometimes have to start over in addressing any problems that may be newly introduced and go through entirely new rounds of testing to ensure quality.
What's The Current Status?
We have been working hard on supporting OS X Leopard since its introduction to developers at WWDC in 2006 for many months (including some period of time prior to Leopard's release). As is often the case with entirely new major OS versions, there were some quick "dot" releases after introduction. Many of the problems that Apple addressed in these dot releases were critical to improve OS X Leopard operations (you can read about some of them on the support section of Apple's website). These improvements and fixes were very valuable to a broad base of Mac users. Unfortunately, the currently shipping OS X Leopard release, 10.5.2, contains some changes that actually caused problems with Pro Tools (and some other apps as well). In our case, the problems included audio interfaces not being recognized by the computer, track counts dropping to near zero, and errors coming up during normal operation. Some of you who may have experimented with Pro Tools and OS X Leopard 10.5.2 may have encountered some of these problems.
We have worked closely with Apple's engineering group, who have been working very hard in cooperation with us to get the problems ironed out. The good news is that we're getting close to the home stretch, but we have to do a lot of testing of the fixes that have been implemented in order to be sure that we're in good shape. We need to make sure that our product works well and you're not just getting something that's marginal, and it takes time to exercise all of the newly changed code.
What Works on Leopard? Anything At All?
Currently, only Pro Tools|HD systems running Pro Tools 7.4.1 software are officially qualified with OS X Leopard 10.5.1 running on the new generation Mac Pro 8 core desktop machines (with "Harpertown" processors). This means no support yet for Pro Tools LE and M-Powered, and it means that users of the new Mac Pros need to stick with OS X 10.5.1 for the time being.
Why this Message?
We have posted this information along the way (just a couple of weeks ago our head of customer service posted information to the DUC), but the amount of time that is passing combined with our concern within the company prompted me to want to reach out to all of you. We work cooperatively with Apple, and want to respect the process that we have in place for fixing problems; but I wanted to give you a bit more information about what's been happening and why we're not there yet...
When Will It Ship?
We hope to have the new release within between 1 and 2 months from now; some of that timetable is contingent on Apple. We'll keep you posted as we get closer. Normally, we don't want to give specific dates because that can cause problems in expectation and it's better not to have negative surprises, but I'd like to share this info with you in the spirit of keeping closer to you as our customers.
I hope that my note gives you a better idea of what's been going on — thanks for listening.
- Dave L.