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.

[Levon River]

CD-Xtract is on its way

There is so much that is endlessly "on its way." If there is a precedent for an operating system that it has taken existing, thriving software and hardware manufacturers nearly THREE YEARS to catch up to, I'd like to know what it is. Music isn't the only arena where MAJOR players (Adobe, Quark) are still just sitting on the sidelines scratching their...scratching something. But the music area has been especially hard-hit and abysmal in the wake of this OS tragedy. I think that Apple's "transition" to OS X will go down in computing history as just one of the biggest FUBAR evolutions ever. It's just pathetic, that's all.

Do YOU think the forum should be called "Limited Music with Macintosh on Mac OS X"? :-(

I was thinking more along the lines of "The Emperor's New Operating System."

Still, everything is coming slowly...

Coming, coming, coming. Why weren't they "coming" a year before OS X was even announced? Was Apple really keeping their developers that much in the dark pre-OS X? If so, then they deserve ALL the criticism that can possibly be heaped on them for this utterly insane mess we, as musicians and Apple supporters, find ourselves in.

(Pro Tools and Digital Performer will be there at the end of the year), probably many plugins with them, too. Because the real problem is here: plugins...

Yeah, that was exactly my deduction in another thread, that the "audio units" were majorly bugged at the OS level, and there's no point selling razors if you can't sell razor blades.

Re: my comments on "Core Audio" and "Core MIDI":

Come on, this system's integration is a great thing, OMS vs FreeMIDI was a pain in the a**, IMHO... Same thing for VST/MAS/RTAS/AS plugins. Everybody made his "thing", incompatible with each others.
Let's move on, shall we?

Yuke, old pal, NONE of us *can* "move on." That's the whole point. Yes, all of those pains in the a** were exactly that, but there is NOTHING that *works* right now to effectively replace them. The fact is the fact is the fact. The promise is HYPE until it is realized in a useful way. The fact is... Well, read your own post. The fact is that the promise has not been realized in any useful way, and we are almost three years down the road. If the manufacturers were caught like deer in headlights when OS X hit, then there is nobody to blame but Apple for gross negligence and incompetence in informing and coordinating with their third-party developers way early and helping them gear up for what was coming. And if there have been CORE level system bugs that have hung up developers, then the crepe *still* should be hung on Apple's door. That's how *I*, your humble narrator, sees it. YMMV.

Don't leave the ship, we need every sailor ;-)

This ain't a ship, Yuke, it's a beat-up life raft, and it's awfully leaky. And Apple is who has abandoned us out here in it. That's why I'm clamorously clanging on this bell. But I'm still here. Perhaps much to Apple's discomfort and dismay.

And OS 9 is perfectly usable for quite some years, i think.

Maybe it is for those who like sitting in it while the world passes by. The way Apple botched the transition, at least for musicians, it sure looks like it *better* be.