The Name Of This Forum Is An Oxymoron, Dude, you're gettin' nowhere--fast. Options

[Levon River]

The very title of this forum is an oxymoron.

There is no music on OS X, not in any meaningful and useful way across the spectrum of musical needs. You're hearing this opinion from a 10-year veteran die-hard Mac evangelist.

Sure, keyboardist Geewhiz has managed to cobble together a magically working combination that allows him to play Reason synths from his keyboard because it just so happens that he has one of the pitiful handful of USB MIDI interfaces that has had an OS X driver written for it. Not that anybody can determine even with a crystal ball which MIDI devices have any such drivers, since many MIDI (and audio) hardware manufacturers just put something nice and ambiguous in their promotional literature and on their web pages like "Mac OS 8.6 and above," leaving the buyer to find out by whatever means they can whether that includes OS X or not--usually *not*.

Or audiophile Gahlee Lookahere can transfer his Spike Jones collection off of scratchy 78-rpms into Peak and tweak. And God bless him.

Anybody can trot out any number of specialist, vertical-use examples to say, "Hey, now, listen here, you troublemaker: I'm making *my* brand of music." Fine. God bless you.

But if there is a single OS X-based studio even operating anywhere in the world right now, not only is it absolutely forced to use Apple's own monopolistic $1,000.00 bank-buster Logic Audio Platinum (after 2 1/2 years with NOTHING available), but it is a desert island cut off by oceans of "no date has been set" promises from the entire rich mainland of third-party software effects and virtual instruments, with only a few working hardware audio and MIDI interfaces bobbing around it like ghostly and uncertain buoys in the darkness.

Even the supposed Flagship of the "Mac-compatible" (please don't laugh) music fleet, Digidesign/ProTools, was so far out of the picture when OS X hit the streets that their top software wouldn't even RUN without risking extreme dangers on a Macintosh that even had OS X *installed* anywhere on it--even on a separate partition!

Even seasoned, experienced, veteran Mac computer music equipment salesmen right now, today, hedge and hem and haw when you're trying to *buy* something from them and want to know if it will work under OS X. Even with commissions on the line, their cash-register driven souls just won't let them cross that line.

This isn't music computing; it's an asylum that makes Bedlam look like Congress. (No, that's a bad analogy; actually Congress makes Bedlam look sane. But that's another essay.)

The names "Core MIDI" and "Core Audio" services must have been dreamed up by someone with a particularly malicious sense of humor, since it seems that what it means is that MIDI and audio access and usefulness have been surgically cored out of Apple, and replaced with some modern digital Tower of Musical Babel that has effectively kept musicians who were attempting to migrate to OS X from communicating with their computers now for almost three years.

And is the end of the bleeding frustration actually in sight? Well, it *always*, is, isn't it? But "no date has been set."

So if you soon see a rash of G3s and G4s--like mine--and other musical paperweights showing up on E-Bay, don't be surprised. Dude, musicians are gettin' a Dell.

[Stuartpa]

I would say that right now the only reason to go to OS X for Music or Audio is to experiment with it.
There is hardly anything worth talking about that is fully OS X Native although that will change pretty soon.

On the other hand OSX is nowhere near as fast as OS 9. It's a drag in some ways but OS X is going to be the future there are a number of issues that are definitely going to change the way we work on OS X.

First of all to get to your Hardware in OS X you have to go through the Kernel or Core of the system and this being software it is always going to be slower than going direct to the hardware as OS 9 does. Of course as the systems increase in Power you might not notice the performance loss, especially as OS X is a true Multi tasking environment.
X is also another way to get you to buy the latest in Apple hardware. I am definitely a real Mac Addict and have been since they very first came out with the LISA, but Apple have definitely never in any way been a user friendly company ( Unlike their computers)
I don't know how much I have spent keeping up tith the Macs but it is a lot and a lot of the expense could have been avoided.

Security could also be a big issue on X as it is based on one of the Most Hacked and Cracked systems that exists Unix, this also applies to Viruses etc.

OS 9 is not invulnerable nothing is, but the number of viruses that attack OS 9 can be listed on one page of text where you would need a Bible sized book to describe all the Viruses available for PC's or Unix.

So really at this time there is not a lot of good reasons to go to X,
I have one system running X for experimentation and learning but all the systems that have to produce are running 9 and I don't even keep X on the boot drives that run the Music systems.

Unfortunately after this next batch of Macs apparently we will not be able to boot into 9 at all, we will be able to use 9 from X but a lot of Music hardware will not permit that.

So for now it is really a waiting game and I am going to wait until I can have everything I am using now on 9, in OS X.
So based on that thinking is one of the reasons I got into the latest release of Macs as I am probably going to need to run 9 for quite a while.

Please GOD (Jobs) do not completely drop support for 9 for at least 3 years. I know he won't listen