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]

All you whiners remind of those old-timers that sit around and bitch&moan about the "the good old days" and how "things used to be better" and "they dont make em like they used to" and all those other cliches and adages common to people not willing to accept the move towards something new and, most probably, better. you all feel and sound helpless like there's nothing you can do but watch the whole world crumble right in front of your eyes. boo f'n hoo. another adage/cliche comes to mind: "rome wasn't built in a day."
you also remind of those dirty hippies and psuedo-liberals that sit around and complain about the system and how nothing's working out right--or at least not the way YOU want it to be--but come mid november do these guys find the time to actually go out and vote and possibly use their own power and rights as citizens to maybe CHANGE things? no, of course not, cuz to them things will never be better. not like they used to be, anyway. yesirree, we're all find and comfy sitting here in our little ruts we got here. nuthin we can do though, not at all.
please.
the whole point of os x is not so jobs can push his new little toy on a bunch of unsuspecting, feeble-minded fools. the point of os x is that it is open. how many times did they stress this when pitching their new system that first year? the point is to start something of a revolution (there you go, hippies) in that people wont HAVE to wait around (as you people love/hate to do so much), they can actually DO something. there are countless brave little developer pilgrims out there expanding their horizons with osx, finding out ways to do things they just couldn't do with os9; and this goes for musicians, too. "if you want something done right, do it yourself" (to coin yet another old chestnut) is what jobs is going for, i think. it's something of a global "F*** OFF" to the likes of microsoft and big business and basic universal conformity in general. it's the open source creed. maybe its cyber communism, who knows. but its working. people like things their way. and with open source systems like osx, people can do things their way, it just takes a little work and some research.
so if you want more progress with music and musicians on macs, try putting in some contructive input instead of sitting around suckin your dentures and reminiscing about the good ol days of os9. pick up your feet and try to help out. tell apple what's wrong with their coreaudio or midi, or try to figure it out yourself. what makes macs so great is that they encourage users to fix their problems on their own, and this is even more true now with osx.
and have faith in those other guys (ie logic, digidesign, motu, etc). it aint easy to redesign a complicated sequencing program from the ground up. maybe they just dont want to make the same mistake that apple did in releasing and selling a piece of software that isn't completely finished being developed. my experience with apple is that they always tend to have something up their sleeve, and if they dont then they will soon. the wait will be worth it. in the meantime, go vote...metaphorically speaking.