BeOS Progress Report: BeDC '99

April 14, 1999

For several years now, geeks from around the world have been descending upon the San Francisco Bay area each Spring for Be's Developer Conference (BeDC). If you think saying "geek" is a bit strong, don't worry - Be even seems to provide themselves on being geeks at times, as evidenced by the pocket protectors touting "We Be Geeks" handed out during last Fall's AES show. This Spring's developer conference was no different, with lovely clipboards made out of circuit boards with a Be logo (and don't forget the whistling of the Star Trek theme during an appropriate moment of a product presentation!)

BeOS Release 4 introduced some very radical changes to the Media Kit, and the entire conference was devoted to the Media Kit. (For those of you not be familiar with BeOS, you can read an earlier article, BeOS Gaining Ground.) As much of the activities were focused on the technical aspects of the Media Kit, I'll mostly be covering what was revealed at the first general session of BeDC with the keynote address.

First of all, Release 4.1 has been delayed until the second half of June and renamed to 4.5, codenamed "Genki" (Japanese for "all is well"). Be stated that they wanted the release not only to be extremely stable, but they wanted to take some time and add more features to it. It will, however, still be a free update. Genki will include USB support, Pentium III optimizations, and other changes, but perhaps the most significant improvement (although it may not seem that way now), will be the enhancements to the new Media Kit. Release 4.5 will simplify things a bit for programmers, reduced general memory requirements, and increase performance. Also, more codecs and drivers will be included, so hopefully many more sound cards will be supported. As a user, you may not notice much difference when you boot up with Genki in the near future, but the big difference will probably be the appearance of new applications, which I'll touch on below.

The remaining portion of the general session was relatively light in terms of audio announcements. They did show off the 3D Mix program (previously Benoit's Mix, named after the engineer that created it) which allows you to view tracks of audio as objects on a virtual sound stage and control the panning and volume of each track by dragging the objects around. The objects can even spout particles in relation to audio events (erupting at the strike of a snare drum, for instance). It even includes phase shifting effects when you move the sound sources. Definitely a cool demo, but not really something new and momentous.

Most of the other products presented in the session focused on the graphics and imaging side of things. Adamation unveiled Personal Studio, a consumer video editing package with real-time effects and transitions, Beatware showed e-Picture, a tool for creating animated images, and MGI Software showed a preview version of Videowave, another video editing suite, for BeOS.

The session closed with a keynote by Thomas Dolby of Headspace (which is changing its name to Beatnik, Inc.). Headspace's synthesis technology is used in the BeOS soft synth, and will be upgraded to provide better sounds with less latency. The Beatnik demo didn't really have much else to do with BeOS. Dolby spent most of the time describing his goal of sonifying the web and displayed some of his recent work, including the "Fame" remixing web page (which was quite cool actually), but using a Windows machine the entire time.

I must admit that I was a bit disappointed after the conclusion of the general session. A number of significant announcements in the music and audio area have been made in the last six months, but nothing really new was revealed here (although N2IT was on hand to show Final Scratch, a nifty DJ mixing program announced earlier here on Harmony Central). Afterwards, I tried to locate representatives from the companies that made some of those recent announcements. I was told Emagic was present, but I wasn't able to locate anyone with the company. However some of the news coming from Steinberg is quite promising.

Back in November of 1998, Steinberg announced they would begin porting NUENDO to BeOS (NUENDO, a product geared mostly towards post-production applications, was previously only announced for SGI and Windows NT). The programmer I spoke with (originally working at Be Europe until two years ago) was hired about a month ago, and is now working full-time on the BeOS port of NUENDO. There were some difficult problems early on, primarily due to the multi-threaded nature of the user interface (UI) in BeOS. Now that there's more manpower behind the BeOS port, those problems have pretty much been solved (but since NUENDO isn't being built from the ground up on BeOS, NUENDO will not take full advantage of all capabilities BeOS provides), and most of the core UI features in the common NUENDO code base are now working under BeOS. The audio I/O aspect of NUENDO on BeOS doesn't exist yet, but that is not expected to be to difficult in any way. Steinberg has pretty much been waiting for the new Media Kit to be completed before implementing the audio. There is still plenty of work to be done on NUENDO, and the BeOS version of NUENDO will most likely not be released until after the Windows NT and SGI versions ship. BeOS is definitely gaining renewed interest within Steinberg, which is very good indeed!

Be has been facing the chicken and egg problem for quite some time (to get users, you need programs, and to get developers to write the programs, you need the users), but once the new Media Kit is finalized, rock solid, and fully understood, more developers will certainly complete their applications - Steinberg can't be the only ones waiting on the Media Kit after all, and that's why the Media Kit improvements may be the most significant feature of Genki in the long run. With the latest Media Kit refinements now in the hands of audio software and hardware developers, hopefully more of the product announcements in the months to come will inform us that products for BeOS are shipping - and not just proclaim the intention to create audio applications for BeOS.

For more information about BeOS, what machines are compatible, and how to get your own copy, visit Be's web site at www.be.com.