Poll: what OS do most people use for music production?

[tsenkov]

certainly off-topic, but somebody knows how much people are using DAW to create music? any study ever done on this topic?

I've researched how big the market is, and while I can't say how many people are using DAW's, the first-line revenue, globally, is about $350M for DAW's and around $80M for plugins.

Where did you get this number. Is this a per year revenue? Assuming average price of a DAW would be around $200, this would make 1,75M paying users a year (assuming all new, no upgrade). I read 1/4 DAW users are paying users, this would lead to 7M users a year. Lots of people keep a DAW more than a year. So I would expect the number to be higher. In any case, this number sound really little, no?

I think this is the case. The market is pretty small.

I've used primarily the 2015 NAMM report (https://www.namm.org/files/ihdp-viewer/ ... eport-2015) and derived the numbers from the US stats. I have to say, these numbers are probably a bit sceptical estimation, in the sense that I think the actual sales are larger. There are 2 factors for that - you can clearly see the industry sales dropping drastically in 2008 (most likely due to the crash of the market) and the industry hasn't recovered from it, yet, but not every market was as impacted as the US. And 2nd, as much as I understood, NAMM aren't really having much of the plugin sales data, so many of the sales remain unaccounted for in this report. Update: just remembered one huge part of this market that NAMM doesn't seem to keep any track of - Mobile!

[fluffy_little_something]

Honestly, I expected even smaller share for OS X. But what I am not sure of, is how much does the average OS X user spends on music production software, compared to the average Win user. My guess is that OS X users spend more, on average, which would ultimately equalize the importance of the 2 platforms.

For the developer it does not really matter because they charge the same price for the OSX and Windows versions of their products, if they offer both.
Not sure whether there is more Windows-only or more OSX-only software out there...
One advantage with Windows is that software is easier to maintain and update when a new version of the operating system is introduced.

[tsenkov]

Honestly, I expected even smaller share for OS X. But what I am not sure of, is how much does the average OS X user spends on music production software, compared to the average Win user. My guess is that OS X users spend more, on average, which would ultimately equalize the importance of the 2 platforms.

For the developer it does not really matter because they charge the same price for the OSX and Windows versions of their products, if they offer both.
Not sure whether there is more Windows-only or more OSX-only software out there...

It matters to the extent whether they (users) will buy your product or not. What I meant is that you could end up with pretty equally divided sales between the 2 platforms, even though Windows users in general are more, hence lesser % of them would buy your software. This is only a speculation, of course - I hope to be able to speak more about that in a few months.

[fluffy_little_something]

On desktops and notebooks OS X accounts for about 9%, W7 alone for about 50%. So indeed, comparing those market shares to this poll, a bigger percentage of Windows users do not use such music software compared to Apple users.

But those people who do not use music software are irrelevant anyway because the poll already shows what matters to developers, i.e. those people that do use such software, and there Windows is clearly the winner.

I don't know about the trend, but if I am not mistaken Apple used to be more important in the music production area than it is today.

[PurpleSunray]

Blizzard just decided to not release Overwatch (a new game) for Mac, but only for PC, PS4 & XBox... mainly because Apple decided to invent their own 3D API and it suckz balls.
I REALLY REALLY hope audio production companies follow doing same.. your AU stuff is bullshit and breaks with every new OS.. done with that now.. no more mac plugins
But don't think that any of the major audio companies has the balls to do that

[Numanoid]

My guess is that OS X users spend more, on average, which would ultimately equalize the importance of the 2 platforms.

Why do polls and try to get some statistics, when we all can just guess and rely on that

What I see around where I live is young blond YAP girls all with their shiny grey Mac computer. I guess they are the ones that spend a lot of time on music production.

[PurpleSunray]

I don't know about the trend, but if I am not mistaken Apple used to be more important in the music production area than it is today.

Definitely. Mac was the system for multimedia out of historic reasons.
The first Mac's already had a jack audio out, while PCs didn't even had an onboard speaker, just some kind of beep-generator. Also all the graphics guys learned Photoshop on Mac, so they just stayed on Mac.
This has been changed a lot recently, at least on my set of acquaintances.
There are literally only 2 ppl left that do audio production on Mac. Some more use MacBooks for their live performance because they believe it's more stable, if it runs once (can't judge, no probs with Win so far for me)
The ppl still on Mac are basically there because of that lifestyle thing. They have an iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, MacBook and an 10 Apple stickers on their bag .. would be strange if they run a PC workstation on their studio xD

[SLiC]

Atari was 'the' system for a while- it had Midi ports!

[tsenkov]

My guess is that OS X users spend more, on average, which would ultimately equalize the importance of the 2 platforms.

Why do polls and try to get some statistics, when we all can just guess and rely on that

What I see around where I live is young blond YAP girls all with their shiny grey Mac computer. I guess they are the ones that spend a lot of time on music production.

@Numanoid, you do know I started this poll, right? And I did say it's a speculation that I need to test.

I would like to ask you guys, all - please, let's not turn this into Mac vs. PC topic. As much as I want to answer some of the things that are not exactly correct, in my own personal opinion, I will restrain my urge and I hope you will follow my example.

If you want to continue discussing which is better and why, please, start a separate topic.

Thank you.

[PurpleSunray]

Atari was 'the' system for a while- it had Midi ports!

!!
Dude, Atari is missing on that poll!!

[wycliffewy]

OSX 10.9.5 on a MacBook Pro, using a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4 and Reaper 5.04.
If it leaves anything to be desired, I don't know what that might be.

[valhallasound]

On desktops and notebooks OS X accounts for about 9%, W7 alone for about 50%. So indeed, comparing those market shares to this poll, a bigger percentage of Windows users do not use such music software compared to Apple users.

But those people who do not use music software are irrelevant anyway because the poll already shows what matters to developers, i.e. those people that do use such software, and there Windows is clearly the winner.

I don't know about the trend, but if I am not mistaken Apple used to be more important in the music production area than it is today.

My sales are split about 50/50, with a slight skew towards OSX. A KVR poll, in the dev forum, with 90 or so respondents, shouldn't be construed as the final say on such matters.

As far as the original question, here are my suggestions:

For OSX, use Xcode 6.4 or later. Use the 10.8 SDK, and target 10.6.

For Windows, use VisualStudio 2010 or later (pretty easy). I've heard that some recent changes in Visual Studio make supporting XP more difficult. There are still some XP users out there, but Microsoft hasn't supported XP for years. It might be best to have your first plugins NOT support XP, as keeping the support for this up and running will be problematic with SDK and compiler changes. Plus, you'd have to keep an XP machine running for testing.

Sean Costello

[masterhiggins]

My sales are split about 50/50, with a slight skew towards OSX. A KVR poll, in the dev forum, with 90 or so respondents, shouldn't be construed as the final say on such matters.

Yes, I'm not sure why people have trouble understanding this. People @ KVR are probably overwhelmingly Windows users, but that doesn't in any way correspond to actual sales numbers. It'd be nice if more developers divulged this info, but for some reason some of them are strangely secretive about it, as if saying anything will potentially destroy their business.

[tsenkov]

On desktops and notebooks OS X accounts for about 9%, W7 alone for about 50%. So indeed, comparing those market shares to this poll, a bigger percentage of Windows users do not use such music software compared to Apple users.

But those people who do not use music software are irrelevant anyway because the poll already shows what matters to developers, i.e. those people that do use such software, and there Windows is clearly the winner.

I don't know about the trend, but if I am not mistaken Apple used to be more important in the music production area than it is today.

My sales are split about 50/50, with a slight skew towards OSX. A KVR poll, in the dev forum, with 90 or so respondents, shouldn't be construed as the final say on such matters.

As far as the original question, here are my suggestions:

For OSX, use Xcode 6.4 or later. Use the 10.8 SDK, and target 10.6.

For Windows, use VisualStudio 2010 or later (pretty easy). I've heard that some recent changes in Visual Studio make supporting XP more difficult. There are still some XP users out there, but Microsoft hasn't supported XP for years. It might be best to have your first plugins NOT support XP, as keeping the support for this up and running will be problematic with SDK and compiler changes. Plus, you'd have to keep an XP machine running for testing.

Sean Costello

Sean, thanks so much for sharing this.

If you are tracking this, would you be willing to share what % of your OS X customers are on OS X lower than 10.9?

[fluffy_little_something]

My sales are split about 50/50, with a slight skew towards OSX. A KVR poll, in the dev forum, with 90 or so respondents, shouldn't be construed as the final say on such matters.

Yes, I'm not sure why people have trouble understanding this. People @ KVR are probably overwhelmingly Windows users, but that doesn't in any way correspond to actual sales numbers. It'd be nice if more developers divulged this info, but for some reason some of them are strangely secretive about it, as if saying anything will potentially destroy their business.

I suppose it also depends what someone is developing. Valhalla (I assume the poster below represents that company) makes professional stuff. Sure, 50 dollars as such is not much, but then again, many hobbyists won't buy a mere reverb for 50 dollars, no matter how good it sounds.
Apple has always been an elitist thingy for wealthier people. And that will show in the sales of plugins as well.
Developers offering both Windows and OSX versions of their stuff should charge twice as much for OSX versions