I recently spoke with Frans at Tascamforums.com.

Apparently there was/is a professional audio workstation that ran BeOS - the Tascam SX1! You can see the specs here. Feature-wise, it's comparable to the Roland VS2480.

Now the good news, lead engineer Tom Duffy is following Haiku's progress.

"I've been following Haiku's development, to see if at some point the SX-1 could run on it instead of BeOS.

Related, but of more immediate importance to me, was virtualizing BeOS to run on VMWare, so I can retire the machine that always compiled the SX-1 releases.

Getting BeOS to virtualize did not go well, it runs like a dog, and I have not been able to get networking to work at all, which is a prerequisite to compiling anything.

The first complete Haiku release (alpha 1) did not even boot on my VMware machine (running ESXi 4.1), but alpha 3 does seem to boot cleanly now.

At some point I'll take the next step and see if Haiku can at least compile the SX-1 source code (even if it can't run it). The SX-1 runs a hybrid BeOS that is mostly version 4 with bits of version 5 pulled in (networking being one)."

It seems he's a bit confused, mistaking Haikuware for Haiku's website (which I've notified Frans of at least).

At any rate, it's good to see that Haiku is being considered for professional audio hardware!