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.

[FroBoy909]

sorry, i dont showcase my music. namely because i have none to show. like you, i am waiting for those big names to come up with something i will be happy to invest my dollars in. unlike you, however (it seems, anwyay), i try to remain optimistic and have faith that those companies that once had your trust will come through with something quite extraordinary, and with os x's abilities i like to think that anything less than extraordinary is damn near impossible. just look at Reason X and tell me that program isn't a success. who knows, maybe i'm just a dreamer[I].
BUT...i think, levon, that you missed my point.
what i am saying is that it does no good to complain about the way things are and expect somebody else to fix it for you. you can spout criticisms til your blue in the face but it gets you nowhere. ask mr jobs himself and he'll tell you that it's the people who strive to do what others cannot who actually achieve what others wish they could have. and who says you cant be a both musician and a programmer? i know that the artist BT is both an excellent musician and an accomplished coder. if you're willing to limit your own abilities (who knows, you could be an awesome programmer) then you have no right to criticize others who are actually trying to accomplish more. hey, you might like getting into the fundamentals of coreaudio, and it's probably a lot easier than you think. i know that, as a musician, i find the stuff very interesting. and just think: then you wouldn't have to wait for ANYbody. you could do your own tweaking right at the source. personally, this is where i see the future of musical composition. but that's just my opinion.
and british poets aside, it was mr willly wonka (aka gene wilder) who characterised the line and whose voice has been speaking the line in my head since childhood. so, for all intents and purposes, we are both right and both wrong. no hard feelings.