has anyone worke audio on an OSX86?

I recently discovered from a buddy of mine that some people are running OSX on an Intel LGA775 PC. Apparently Apple, having dumped IBM as a processor partner in the future, has switched alliances to intel and has sent their developers, kits that used intel socket LGA 775 boards. And this is native, not emulated. Ergo OSX86.

This really has a lot of ramifications akin to "welcome to the Dark side of the Force" kind of thing. Are we expecting an entirely new OS in the near future?

So has anybody tried recording/mixing on this platform? My friend told me that with a certain setup of mobo/cpu, everything runs, firewire, audio, video, PCI, lan/wifi.

There have been some threads on here before about running OS X on Intel, but it sounds like what you're describing is more advanced...a lot of peripherals wouldn't work when this surfaced several months ago.

I haven't seen the latest, but I did mess around with an early leaked version. (I have an iBook, & I'm terminally curious.) Then, several things didn't work, but much of it did.

I've read about guys figuring out this & that, and I'm sure that the developers have made more progress than the hobbyists, so I wouldn't be too surprised that it were true. Remember, it's largely based around BSD, which will run on x86 just fine. It's not a complete re-do for them to change to Intel.

I don't know if it's words of encouragement to the troops int he development trenches or straight up, but I keep bumping into articles suggesting that the platform conversion process for most software is pretty minimal. Obviously, with something like audio -- which these days is tightly integrated with the OS -- it seems like there could be deeper challenges.

But it mostly seems to be lollipops and roses in the articles I've scanned.

Heck, the first wave of Intel-powered Macs is just about around the corner. The big gun desktops will have to wait a while but the new era is just about upon us.

I think, if I was a Mac guy, I'd wait until things shake out a little. Maybe more than a little. Intel is going to have some reputed rocketships -- cool-running efficient rocketshps by all accounts -- coming up over the next year or two. I know I'm looking forward to building a quiet, fast desktop box around one of the new chips when they're availablae (and prices have settled down).

I watched Steve Jobs give his talk to the Apple WWDC when he announced the switch to Intel.

He showed an Intel-based Mac computer running all kinds of intensive applications including Photoshop.

However, the ONLY audio app he showed was iTunes. Since Apple owns Emagic, I would have expected him to at least show some basic Logic (or even Garageband) usage, but he didn't.

My guess is that this will be a very slow process for Audio and Music developers/users on the Mac platform.

I know that I will NOT jump on the Mac-Intel platform bandwagon until it has been out for a while. I'm happy to let other users experience the initial frustrations that will surely be there.

However, having said that, I must admit that I think the switch to Intel is a great decision in the long term for Audio/MIDI users. Besides the obvious power dissipation benefits, it is well known that the floating point unit in the Pentium is superior to the one in the PowerPC chip. Once the initial frustrations are out of the way, I think Mac users will have much better machines to run Audio/MIDI apps on, especially for apps like synths/effects that use a lot of floating point processing.

the key I heard is the intel graphics chipset which is the only one thats really compatible and certain on-board soundcards. But if ports like firewire 800, usb, wifi/lan, work, I don't see any reason why you can't run audio apps with it. Man, if you can set up an LGA775, mobos for that are about less than 100$ and processors ranging from 30$ celerons to $500 dual cores. I really wonder how intel macs would then stack up with windows machines.