Wednesday 18 June 2014

Snow Leopard Dropped

A quick update for BitPerfect's few remaining Snow Leopard users.

We were obliged to stop supporting Snow Leopard with the 2.0.1 release of BitPerfect when we discovered that the iTunes Library Framework implementation in iTunes 11.x for Snow Leopard was flawed. Recently, iTunes 11.2.2 was released and this bug was corrected, so we had real hopes of re-introducing support for Snow Leopard with the next release of BitPerfect.

Unfortunately, in extensive Beta testing, BitPerfect is still proving to be rather unstable under Snow Leopard, and the problems appear to be rather deep-seated so we don't anticipate a simple fix.

The bottom line for us is that the amount of effort required to attempt to continue supporting Snow Leopard does not justify the hold-out user base (estimated at less than 100 users out of a total active user base of over 21,000). Therefore Snow Leopard users should no longer expect to see the return of Snow Leopard support in a future update.

It used to be that Snow Leopard was worth hanging on to from an audio perspective since it provided access to BitPerfect's Integer Mode. However, with Integer Mode support enabled in Mavericks this no longer became a critical issue. Finally, extensive listening tests have revealed that Mavericks does in fact sound significantly better than Snow Leopard, with or without Integer Mode.

So, our apologies must go out to our Snow Leopard users, but, being realistic, you must surely have anticipated that this day would come at some point.