Admin wrote:We are certainly committed to moving forward with all of our products and are definitely planning on giving you all something this year! Can't tell you exactly what is in store for the updates, but they WILL be significant.
-Kyle
Excellent! 
As you know, NOTION 3 is the foundation for my
DISCO and
Pop song composition and production system, and this makes NOTION 3 so vastly important that I have a strategic plan in place to be able to do what I call "freezing time", which includes providing a separate computer, hardware, software, and everything else necessary to keep everything the way it currently exists, which is something I do every once in a while with irreplaceable applications, which in this particular instance costs approximately $200, since all I had to do was get a hard drive and clone it using SuperDuper!, because it is virtually trivial to swap an internal hard drive on the 2.8-GHz 8-core Mac Pro and takes about 10 minutes, followed by booting the the cloned drive . . .
SuperDuper! (Shirt Pocket)There certainly are some aspects of NOTION 3 that can be updated and enhanced, but it is very important to understand that NOTION 3 generally is
perfect the way it exists today . . .
For reference, my perspective is a bit different in part due to being a formally trained Computer Scientist, as well as being a registered Mac OS X and iOS application developer, which I started doing on the Mac OS X application side about 10 years ago when I decided that doing the same thing in the Microsoft universe was not a productive activity for me, even though I had been doing Windows application, database, and system development since the first version of Windows . . .
From this perspective, the most important thing is to make NOTION 4 a true 64-bit application, although with compatibility for 32-bit VST effects plug-ins and VSTi virtual instruments . . .
And it is fine with me if everything in the NOTION 4 graphic user interface (GUI) looks and works exactly the same way it does in NOTION 3, and for the most part this not only (a) is fine but also (b) is desired, since one of the things that makes NOTION 3 so easy and productive to use is its specific GUI . . .
The current 32-bit application workspace limitation requires me to spread "heavy" VSTi virtual instruments over perhaps as many as 50 synchronized NOTION 3 scores (a.k.a., "*.notion" project files), but I put all of them in a folder and have a file naming standard where I append "PT-n" to the file name, which makes it trivial to do or to redo the ReWire to Digital Peformer 7.24, which is the way that get the NOTION 3 generated audio recorded in Digital Performer 7.24 as "soundbites", where by doing something similar in Digital Performer 7.24 (since it also currently is a 32-bit application and has the same 32-bit application workspace limitations) it is practical to have as many as 500 to 1,000 instrumental tracks for a song, albeit with a significant bit of "bouncing to disc" to create layers in the strategy defined by Les Paul in the early-1950s and enhanced by Phil Spector ("Wall of Sound") and George Martin (Beatles) over the next decade or so . . .
Judging by the processor utilization reported by Activity Monitor (Mac OS X 10.6.8), the highest utilization I have observed for NOTION 3 and Digital Performer 7.24 is in the range of 15 to 20 percent, which indicates to me that the 2.8-GHz 8-core Mac Pro has plenty of available processing capability to handle a lot more work when everything is 64-bits, especially is it is done in such a way that activities and tasks can be run essentially in parallel on multiple cores rather than single-stepped . . .
Based on the Notion Music iPad applications, all of which I have, the expertise certainly exists to do the 64-bit version for Mac OS X correctly, and while the more naive folks might think that it is not such a big deal to do a 64-bit version, the fact is that it is a
lot of work when it is done the right way . . .
I am by no means an expert in any aspect of Mac OS X application development and iOS app development--with the exception of being skilled in native, low-level C/API SQLite stuff (including SQL database designing and programming)--I know enough generally about the way everything works on the Mac to state the fact that software engineers who can do an excellent iOS version of a Mac OS X application essentially can do everything in the Apple universe, including an eloquent 64-bit version of NOTION, which is the primary thing I would like to see perhaps by this time next year, although if it happens sooner, this will be fine with me, which is fabulous . . .
Fabulous! 
P. S. I think that younger folks probably have a very different perspective on the level of technology in all this stuff, but the way I put it into perspective is that 50 years ago doing all of this stuff was only possible for those few folks who had million dollar recording studios and the ability to hire real orchestras, but now it is not only possible but also practical to do, for example, all the songs on "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" (Beatles) and "The Dark Side of the Moon" (Pink Floyd) inside a Volkswagen "Beetle" using a MacBook Pro, NOTION 3, a virtual festival of VST effects plug-ins and VSTi virtual instruments, a USB microphone, and a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) application like Digital Performer 7.24 (MOTU) or Logic Studio (Apple), which is simply mind-boggling . . .
Mind-boggling! 
Posted: Mon Jan 16, 2012 6:46 am
