Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Pro Tools 7 now supports Intel Macs

Pro Tools, one of the flagship music applications on the Mac platform, has finally gotten support for Intel Macs. Intel Mac support was announced previously, but the downloads for Pro Tools LE 7.1.1 & Pro Tools M-Powered 7.1.1 were finally posted at Digidesign's website yesterday.

Interestingly, it is not a universal binary. The 7.1.1 update adds Intel Mac support, but only works on Intel Macs. Those with PowerPC Macs will continue to use version 7.1, which has identical functionality.

This is an important milestone for Apple, since previous versions of Pro Tools did not work on Intel Macs at all, even under Rosetta. Other major hurdles for Apple to overcome in this Intel x86 Mac transition are the universal binaries of Adobe Creative Suite 3 (which is not due until 2007), and QuarkXPress 7 (which is due in the second half of this year). Fortunately, these at least work in Rosetta, albeit slowly. Microsoft Office is also a flagship Mac program which is still running under Rosetta, but fortunately, speed in Office is not a critical issue for most people. Office performance on Intel Macs is slow, but it remains quite usable for most.

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