Hi Chris
There seems to be a bit of a perception amongst our Windows customers that it is some sort of second tier for us. This is very much not true, and I'd like to address whatever it is that has lead to that idea.
Whilst it's true we released EigenD for Windows quite a while after EigenD for MacOS, we actually spend a lot of time working on Windows and have done since 2008. The Pico has been fully supported for well over a year now, and Alpha and Tau's now run fine with the exception of the headphone output which is due for inclusion in 1.4. We work on MacOS and Windows bugs at about the same rate, which given that the majority of our customers use MacOS, I think this is very fair to our Windows users.
The biggest issue with Windows is that it is a much less homogeneous environment running a hugely wider variety of hardware. This makes developing and testing for it a lot slower than for MacOS and also means that some of the bugs we get reported are very hard to reproduce. If a MacOS bug is reported to us we normally have a hardware version identical or at least very close to the originating system which makes reproducing and finding it possible. The same cannot be said of Windows and as a small company it is unlikely we'll ever be able to afford the many, many machines that we'd need to keep installed and running to make this come true. I suspect that as a consequence of this Windows development (in particular bug fixing) will always lag MacOS a little. Jim Chapman, our Technical Director and head of the software team develops mainly on Windows these days (he made himself do this to make sure it got done and tested well) and you will find that we fix Windows bugs pretty much as fast as MacOS ones as a result, if we can reproduce them, which is the nub.
The virtual MIDI port issue here is a particular case in point about Windows development. On MacOS this is a non issue, we don't actually have to do anything to make it happen as the audio/MIDI system is generally better thought out than the Windows equivalent (as is to be expected really given Apple's prevalence in he media world). On Windows we have to write a device driver, test it extensively or as far as we can with as many different systems as we can find and then deal with all the driver signing and installation hassle (which if you've written a Windows driver you'll know is often more trouble than writing it in the first place) and then test that installation process, which is also very time consuming and error prone. This feature has not been left out of EigenD because it's for Windows users, its been left out so far because its a lot of work for a feature that has only been asked for by a small number of customers and that can (albeit badly and with some hassle and cost) be dealt with by a third party product, Loopbe. It is on the list though, it's just that we have a lot of big things to get done for 2.0 that have to be done or it can't be released, and it's just not as important as they are - it's lack of immediate priority has little to do with it being a Windows only feature.
Anyway, rant over! Sorry about that but I've heard several Windows based people recently imply that we don't care about them and don't work on Windows enough. Given the amount of time Windows only issues eat up here I don't think that's a reasonable point of view.
We will hopefully get a virtual MIDI port into 2.0 for the Autumn, I know Jim wants it, and you are quite correct, without it one has to pay for, install and configure LoopBe, which is very irritating.
John
UK
