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[bjarvis]

A couple of weeks ago, Kent bought himself a new Mac Book for his birthday. He bought Parallels at that time, a utility which allows a virtual machine to execute. In effect, one can have a Mac window boot and execute some other operating system (Solaris, Linux, Windows, whatever) while still running Mac programs in parallel. (This is different from the Boot Camp utility which allows one to boot the computer into one operating system or another, but not execute them at the same time.)

One of his birthday presents this weekend was a home edition of Windows XP which he installed on the laptop to run Windows apps simultaneously with Apple apps.

Last night, he installed Vic Ceder's CSDS square dance application with WinAmp and PaceMaker in the Windows XP virtual machine. Although some minor configuration updates still need to be made, it does indeed work rather smoothly: he was able to play and control square dance MP3s via CSDS.

I was more than a little amazed at this. It's one thing to execute simple Windows applications in a virtual machine, it's quite another to implement a hardware abstraction layer which can snag the library calls for seriously ugly I/O, translate them seamlessly to MacOS calls and perform the juggling act without a significant performance impact on something as time-sensitive as music. I'm seriously impressed.

We'll still keep the HP laptop for calling as it is kept relatively pristine to avoid bizarre software conflicts which might manifest in the middle of a dance, but if we can work out the rest of the configuration we'll purchase an extra license of CSDS for the Mac Book.

Comments

[apparentparadox]

I don't know, I think that emulating I/O for sound has to be about the easiest thing -- the one end is generally a hardware card, so they have to have good specs for it. The real pain is emulating software libraries, because some people count on the bugs in them.