Apple buys leading audio software maker Emagic

GNU lover writes: “Apple announced that they bought EMagic one of the leading maker of professional audio software (Logic Audio). In their pressrelease they say that the Windows versions of EMagic’s applications will be discontinued by september. Emagic has about 200,000 users of which 65% are Mac users. This means about 70,000 Windows users are now screwed. read the pressrelease
and the article on The Register.

My question is: what was the motive of the acquisition of EMagic by Apple ? Luring away users away from Windows ?

I don’t think that this works since the audio field is really a niche field.

What does it mean for Linux users ? Being OS X an unix-like OS, I guess that it is probably quite easy to port OS X apps to Linux.

But I guess that Apple would not be too interested in the linux market since linux is basically yet another competitor to them.

Once again commercial software vendors demonstated that they can screw their userbase at any time letting them alone in the dark.

Hopefully the Linux Audio Developers will be able to catch up soon and provide serious opensource competitors to these commercial audio apps: these include

Ardour – Professional Harddisk recording with pro audio card support (24bit,ADAT, multitrack etc),
Muse a flexible MIDI sequencer similar to Cubase,
Jack a low-latency audio server that let you run several realtime audio apps at the same time and
LADSPA The Linux Audio Developer’s Plugin API.”