I would've agreed with you folks about the Mac love for all things audio.

But then I read this, and it really got me thinking. Could you jump camps?

http://tapeop.com/columns/end-rant/115/



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Why did you post this?

*j*
.~

Interesting article. The only problem I've had with my MACs is when Mountain Lion took away all the drop down menus in Pro Tools 10. Of course, Pro Tools 11 had no such problem, and I already had a license for it, so after finally porting all my plugins over to the 64-bit version of Pro Tools (and now with version 12 something), I have had no problems installing the latest and greatest MacIOS.

But then, I also run Pro Tools on my PCs as well, but I still prefer my MAC mini for stability, which seems to be the very thing that people are having trouble with versus Windows. I've (knocks on wood) not had problems with either flavors of OS with Pro Tools or any of my Native Instruments products. That kind of OS problem really saps the productivity and creativity time.

Wow. Sorry to dredge up this thread, but that particular article really irked me, and I felt I ought to comment on it a bit.

Full disclosure: I'm an IT professional, and for the last 7 years or so I've been focused exclusively on the Mac, most of that time in video production. There are SO many things wrong with this guy's approach to computers it's hard to know where to start...

OK, so you used a Mac waaay back since the System 6 days...yet you somehow just realized that you can't downgrade new Macs to old OS versions? That's been Apple's stated MO for at least a decade if not longer, especially since they moved away from Motorola processors to Intel. (You might get away with -1 version IF there has been no hardware change.) But that's hardly an Apple thing - ask anyone with warm, fuzzy feelings about Windows XP whether they can put it on their current machine. New hardware = new driver software. Nobody backward-patches forever.

About your old OS9 machine that you keep around...the handwriting was on the wall a looooong time ago about these changes. It's a testament to Apple's engineering that it still runs - hell, we had one in our rack room too, that ran some obscure fonting application, and everyone in the building lived in mortal fear of restarting it. And that alone should tell you that you don't run mission-critical applications on obsolete hardware. That's just a bad approach to your business.



WTF are you doing upgrading a system in the middle of a recording session?? You don't test in a production environment! Take one of your six Macs and set up a damn test system. Or, better still - add a hard drive to one of them & upgrade THAT. Then if it's messing up, all you do is restart the system from the original hard drive & move on, and troubleshoot later.

Incidentally, software updates are not being "forced" on you, the main exception being updates to back-end security that disables Flash or Java in Safari for being out-of-date. None of this is going to affect your DAW, though. If you don't want to update, then just don't.

I advise people to NEVER update production machines right away. First, you need to check with your vendors for any necessary updates - some are quicker than others to test & release updates, but you don't want to discover that they can't support a new OS after you've upgraded. Also, it's wise to check around the web for other peoples' experiences first. There are always early adopters, and they're the ones who discover that the lasted update broke (x) or (y). Let them take the lead, and learn from them before you leap. And always - ALWAYS - make backups before you upgrade, so you have a fallback plan. It's so easy, there's really no excuse NOT to. Carbon Copy Cloner can make a bootable copy of your hard drive while it's running - point it at an external drive and go to lunch. Then, if your upgrade goes south, you can be back where you started in less than an hour.

Stripping down the feature set of a computer is really a bit of a holdover from the days when they were far less powerful, and you had to tune them like a race car for them to keep up with recording & playback. Still, it certainly helps to free up resources - but you're really not gaining anything by deleting the system-installed apps except a modicum of disk space. (You shouldn't be recording onto the booted drive anyway - you should be on a dedicated external disk.) There are plenty of acceptable ways to disable services - ask a professional if you can't Google the solution yourself. If you ran a tape-based studio you wouldn't think twice about paying a technician come in to service your Studer A-880 - so if you can't optimize your systems then hire someone who can, and get on with running your business.

There's more I could say, but this is enough of a rant. TL;DR - being an audio guy does not necessarily make you a competent computer administrator. That said, from one who is both after much professional training and experience.

He's comparing an out-of-the-box Mac with a turnkey PC. He even notes the RADAR is a turnkey rig near the end of the article.

apples to oranges - almost literally

Yeah I read that Tape Op article and felt the same. I was about to write something but did not want to ruin my day with negative energy. I was rather late to leave the PC/Microsoft world. Been on Mac´s for alittle more than 10 years about. I´ve saved so much time going over to Mac that it´s ridiculous. Now I can work instead of trying to find out whats wrong..... I worked on a PC just a couple of months ago again and almost had a panic attack. I would never go back. I agree with everything you say but he makes a couple of valid points. Mostly in the add ons after his article. A Pro version of Mac OS for audio, video and graphic folks would be a good thing. The transition period around when OS X was released was abit of a hassle. Apple bought Logic around that time as well and it was not all smooth. But compared to PC´s then its a silly thing to even mention. The thing that made me laugh out loud was this....



Has he even found the Advanced mode in Logic? I use Logic, Protools, Ableton Live and Digital Performer in the studio. I suspect that he is not running a full blown recording studio where he records grand piano, drums, string sections etc.... He would never have written that if he does. I suspect he is into modern, programmed, music. I personally prefer Logic or Protools as my main DAW´s in the studio and when working with film I use Digital Performer. I could easily use DP all day long. It´s a fantastic program. And has some cool features when working with film. But not many people are using DP over here so I tend to use what most others are using to make things easier. And most pro people use Logic or Protools. I use Ableton Live as a inspirational tool. It makes me experiment alittle more and it makes me think differently when it comes to music production. It makes me work in a different way. I like it. It´s good fun. But I would NEVER use it as my main DAW during a recording session. Never in my life. It is very obvious to me that it was never intended to replace a tape machine in a studio in that way. It has a DJ vibe over it. It´s intended for live use initially and that is still what it does best I feel. I personally get a much greater "preset vibe" over Ableton compared to Logic. I might have missed something. I don´t know. But I don´t agree with him at all regarding choice of DAW´s. I suspect that he does not run a full blown recording studio.

Yeah, it would be nice to see a "pro" macOS. I'd like to see them pay more attention to creatives too, but it bears remembering that we are a somewhat limited market. Their iDevice business is what really pays the bills, so as long as we don't get forgotten completely there is a plus side to it.

Sure, the OS X transition was a pain - but remember, that was a complete sea change. A whole new OS is going to take time to come up to speed - and at this point, that's far in the past & no longer an issue. Microsoft had similar issues when changing from 98 to XP, and moving from 32-bit to 64-bit systems. That just goes with the territory, I'm afraid.

As painful as that switch from 32-bit to 64-bit was, and the upgrading of the OS, when Pro Tools finally went to 64-bit, I noticed a vast, vast improvement in my resource management and the efficiency of my plugins. What used to overtax my 2012 Mac Mini in 32-bit, now barely takes up a footprint in memory or processing compared to the older versions. I hated--at first--having to upgrade all of my many plugins to 64-bit versions to get them to work, but once that was done, I saw a tremendous improvement in my ability to do several complicated things at once without overloading the Mac's chip.

I don't run a professional recording studio, but I'm constantly creating things in Pro Tools, and I've had very few problems with MAC OS, other than trying to run software that was optimized for older OS and hadn't yet been updated for the new OS--like Pro tools version 10 that had drop down menus that wouldn't show under Mountain Lion. Fix: upgrade to PT 11!

The suggestion to make a complete hard drive backup is a great one and easy to do. It lets me undo even the most messed up thing I've done with my software and plugins and returns me to a working state. But I've only had to use it once, when I had a hard drive failure.

I had so many problems with Pro Tools under PC at first. Once I got the MAC mini, I've had very few. Having said that, I actually prefer Windows, and if it worked better with PT, I'd probably use it instead. But I swim just fine in Windows, MAC, and even Linux on the occasional widget.

I've vastly enjoyed listening to you fulltime studio folk talk about MACs versus PCs and the best ways to upgrade and still keep things from breaking. Excellent thread and topic!

Apples and oranges, all I will say...