[geeks] Re: Octane audio software

[Gavin Hubbard]

<<
On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 02:57 AM, Kevin wrote:
> The Octane seems to be pretty well equipped audio wise, even
> in it's base configuration. That being said, i have never
> heard of anyone doing any significant audio work with an SGI.
> Anyone know of any good audio apps that run on the Octane?
> Multi track, editing or synth type stuff?

Indeed, I was shocked to see digital audio I/O on the octane that 
showed up here a few days ago. I would *love* to see some cool 
software to take advantage of this. I wish I had more time; maybe I'd 
try to write some. :-(

-Dave
>>

One of the coolest SGI tricks I've ever seen was an Octane workstation that could natively read and write 48kHz stereo audio data through the SCSI bus to an audio DAT using a DDS drive. IIRC you had to have a drive with special firmware (possibly the Archive Python drive?) and the software was called Xdat.

At the time, the music labels were fighting tooth and nail to stop ADAT from taking a hold in the consumer market (the ability to make perfect digital copies - oh the humanity). AFAIK apart from a few dedicated audio editing consoles, no other computer system has ever been produced with this functionality.

Nowadays with the easy availability of different digital audio formats this doesn't sound so impressive. But even up to the late ninties, DAT was easily the best quality digital recording format avaiable.

Regards,

Gavin