Re: Osx and Windows split

[Jeffrey Larson <jeff@zonemobius.com>]

I haven't used Fusion, but I've used other VMware products
and if it works the same it is a "virtualizer" rather than
an "emulator" like Wine.

Emulators provide an environment that looks similar to Windows to the
application, but it isn't really Windows.  This works well for some
applications but it can add overhead and typically has problems for
applications that need relatively low level access to devices.  This
includes audio applications that use ASIO drivers for audio
devices.  I've heard AudioMulch runs under Wine on Linux, but many
don't. I think someone tried to run standalone Mobius under
Wine and it didn't work but I don't remember what the problems were.

AFAIK you can't use Wine to wrap a Windows VST and use that
in a Mac version of Ableton.  You would have to run a Windows
version of Ableton itself under Wine, then have it load Windows
VSTs.  I've never heard of anyone doing that successfully.

A virtualizer like VMWare runs an actual copy of Windows inside
another OS.  These usually work better than emulators but they still
add a small amount of overhead and can have problems with device
drivers.  I use VMWare all the time at my job and it works very,
very well, but I've never tried it with audio applications.  My guess
is that Ableton would run fine, but you might not be able to get
latencies as low as you would running Windows directly against the
hardware.  It's worth a try if you can download a demo version.

Note though that you need a licensed version of Windows to install
in the VMware image and Windows versions of whatever software
you want to run.  Like an emulator this will not let you use
a Windows VST inside a Mac host.

Jeff