ProTools with OSX-- Are we going backwards??

[Chief Technician]

>p.s. Remember 10k rpm Glyph SCSI Hotswap drives? Before total acceptance of FW drives did away with >speedy zoom in/outs and snappy editing? Nothing like hearing my FW churn as I wait for it to slowly >seek out the audio files for a re-draw at every zoom level! fun fun!

Does U160 or U320 SCSI not work well with OS-X?

It does work. I've got an ATTO UL3D in a Dual 2.0GHz G5 for Final Cut Pro, and have yet to have a disk problem.

Oh, and my 9 stable MIXPlus systems with SYNC I/Os are configured as follows:

SIx (6) QuickSilver 2002 933MHz G4s
1.25GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9000 Pro Mac Edition
Seagate ST340016A internal ATA for Pro Tools
Additional DSP Farm (Merle) card with AMCC chip QC or later (PCI 2.1 mod)
Canopus ADVC-100
TerraTec Phase22 PCI audio card
LaCie d2 16x DVD+/-R/RW firewire drive
Of these 6 systems, 2 have a Mackie HUI, 2 have a Mackie Control Universal, 1 has a MotorMix, 1 has a Command|8
One has an additional 888

Three (3) MDD Dual 1.25GHz G4s
1.25GB RAM
ATI Radeon 9000 Pro Mac Edition
Seagate ST340016A internal ATA for Pro Tools
Additional DSP Farm (Merle) card with AMCC chip QC or later (PCI 2.1 mod)
Canopus ADVC-100
TerraTec Phase22 PCI audio card
LaCie d2 16x DVD+/-R/RW firewire drive
1 has a MotorMix, 1 has a Command|8, and 1 has a mouse

All nine have the following plugins and options:
Amp Farm
Echo Farm
Digidesign/BombFactory MoogerFooger Bundle
Bruno/Reso
D-Fi
DigiTranslator
DINR
DPP-1
Drawmer Dyanmics
D-Verb
Focusrite d2/d3
Prosoniq Orange Vocoder
MachineControl
Sound Toys UltraTools
SurroundScope
T.C.|MasterX
T.C.|Tools
VocAlign Project
Waves Gold
Waves Restoration (native)

[ProToolsguy56]

Thanks Chief, I've printed out your specs for reference, I'm going to have a look at things later this week.

I'm going to comment on some different people all at once:

>i think you also mentioned "Glyph 10k SCSI drives" as well. big whoop. you do realize that you can >get 10k S-ATA drives for your power mac g5 ? oh yeah. and its a fraction of the cost of that >"professional" glyph drive.

Who cares if a SATA drive is a fraction of the cost. The RPM speed of a drive has absolutely nothing to do with the technicalities of the disk interface. SCSI is for enterprise use. SATA is for mid-range use...somewhere in the middle of desktop and enterprise. It would take too long to explain the benefit of SCSI over ATA types.

>As soon as I saw PT6 and how they did away with the simple gray interface, I knew Digi was on their >way to a quantity, not quality business model

I personally liked the simple gray interface. I just don't see functionally how a pretty editing screen gains you speed. For me the big let down was when the HD systems came out. It looks like they got a room full of hip hop producers, and designed their new boxes purely on their impressions. Not to say that hip hop guys are dumb...but I don't think it's to far off to say BLING BLING with the HD systems. They look PURE tacky and cheap.

To me the black mix systems look way more professional than HD.

>Not blaming them tho-- They gotta keep up with competition for the consumer market and with where >Apple goes. Too bad they are losing their pro niche tho.

They have to keep up with this market, yes. This is the future for Digi I think. The MBOX and host based systems. Host based with all the TDM features would be nice...and only on XP. Of course this will never happen, since majority of post people are Mac Crazy.

[Mt.Everest]

>As soon as I saw PT6 and how they did away with the simple gray interface, I knew Digi was on their >way to a quantity, not quality business model

I personally liked the simple gray interface. I just don't see functionally how a pretty editing screen gains you speed. For me the big let down was when the HD systems came out. It looks like they got a room full of hip hop producers, and designed their new boxes purely on their impressions. Not to say that hip hop guys are dumb...but I don't think it's to far off to say BLING BLING with the HD systems. They look PURE tacky and cheap.

To me the black mix systems look way more professional than HD.

Not sure if you misunderstood me, but thats exactly what I was saying. The gray, simple look of the software was perfect and easy on the eyes during those long sessions. I remember thinking in those days " wow, I LOVE how Digi hasnt filled up every inch of screen with annoying graphics like Logic or Cubase. It was nice to be able to rest my eyes staring at a big, blank gray spot.

And absolutely, the MIX stuff looked really pro. The first day I saw the HD stuff my jaw dropped over how CHEESY, CHEAPO, and UN-PRO the stuff looked. But hey, the interfaces make that cool blue wave when you have alot of them stacked up! My 10 year old cousin pointed that out when he came by the studio. They probably move alot more units at Guitar Center now.

MT

p.s. OT, but does anyone else hate that you cant turn voices off in the edit window anymore when your track is in 'small' view? Thats the mode I work in and it sucks having to go back and forth between the mix & edit windows to figure out whats going on with my voices. arrgh!

[Evil Jack]

The thing I hate most about OSX which goes against everything that the Macintosh originally stood for is 'Ownership and Permissions'... Owner, Group, Access, System, appserver, cyrus, daemon, mailserver, nobody, blah blah blah....It's a Unix thing and it causes me a lot of headaches when sharing files between the macs on our local network.
I use a mac because I hate all that geeky computer stuff. I want to switch the thing on get on with my music.......Get rid of it Apple or make it invisible to the user.

[StadiumRocker]

It seems like some of you don't know how to use your operating system. No offense ladies, but some of you are complaining about things that have easy solutions:

Evil Jack -- Don't wanna deal with permissions? You can "Get Info" on a drive and check the box "Ignore permissions on this volume". Or give everybody in your studio an admin account login password. Problem solved. Or, if you really don't want to deal with permissions ever again, enable root user access on all your computers and/or set the computers to boot in single-user mode and give everyone root access. You will never have permissions problems again in your facility (though you will likely have some other rather serious problems when someone deletes the wrong file in your System folder, which is why permissions are a good thing).

Lee Blaske -

Does anyone know if the iLok communicates with home at regular intervals on computers hooked up to a network? I wouldn't put it past them.

Download this program (Little Snitch). It traps all outbound network traffic and prompts you to allow or deny it. Awesome program. Doesn't use any CPU resources. To answer your question: no -- iLok doesn't phone home unless you do something to make it phone home (net authorization, etc).

ProToolsGuy56 wrote:

SCSI is for enterprise use. SATA is for mid-range use...somewhere in the middle of desktop and enterprise. It would take too long to explain the benefit of SCSI over ATA types.

Meanwhile, in the music production world, SATA and FW800 blow SCSI away in terms of price/performance. Also, re XP and process manager, unnecessary processes on the Mac can be disabled just as with XP.

Mt. Everest - You keep saying that no soft synths work reliably, but I run Reason, Live, BFD, Melodyne, Virus/Indigo, and SampleTank all day every day without any problems (not all at once, but often two or three at once). NI stuff crashes me now and then, but that's no surprise -- NI has always been unstable.

Uno1234 -- kernal panics = reinstall OS X, bad RAM, or a hardware conflict of some sort. You gotta spend a weekend tearing down the rig and rebuilding it (clean install, reinstall hardware one piece at a time, etc). I would be firing up a chainsaw if my rig was having that many problems. I definitely feel your pain, but...dude...just fix it.

Every serious pro composer I've ever worked with (H. Zimmer, J.N. Howard, etc) that has to meet deadlines and work on music instead of deal with computer problems has a wall full of synths and dedicated computers for soft-samplers. I have learned to accept the fact that when you install all this latest greatest software on one Mac and try to run it all simultaneously, you're setting yourself up for a big letdown. Still, I'll take the reliability I've had with the above mentioned apps over the hell I experienced with OMS/IAC sync anyday. Rewire is awesome. I get lots of work done.

Bottom line, saying that OS 9 is better than OS X is just plain silly. In OS 9, on a really good day, I could get Pro Tools 5.1.1 and Studiovision 4.2.2 to run simultaneously for a few hours before a white box with the word "Restart" appeared on the my screen. I definitely wasn't running any soft synths (other than SampleCell TDM, which had plenty of problems and crashes), or browsing the net on the same computer, or downloading files from a client, or burning a CD in the background, or batch converting a bunch of files while I continued to work, or pumping 16 virtual rewire channels into the PT mixer. I'm way more productive now than I was with OS 9.

Also, if you want a really slimmed down version of Panther that uses much less memory, runs far fewer background processes, disables much of the slowdown eye candy Quartz graphics, and has a Finder that is ten times more responsive than the stock setup, it's very easy to configure, and the results are amazing, but you'll have to learn a little UNIX and a little OS X trickery. Or pay me a consulting fee and I'll do it for you.

[Evil Jack]

Also, if you want a really slimmed down version of Panther that uses much less memory, runs far fewer background processes, disables much of the slowdown eye candy Quartz graphics, and has a Finder that is ten times more responsive than the stock setup, it's very easy to configure, and the results are amazing, but you'll have to learn a little UNIX and a little OS X trickery. Or pay me a consulting fee and I'll do it for you.

Precisely my point. Macs used to be the 'computer for the rest of us'. Now they're for people who like messing around with computers...Geeks (no offense ).

[StadiumRocker]

Yeah, I'm a geek. But, only because I have to be to make stuff work. Believe me, I'd rather that every piece of software and hardware ever invented was designed 'specially just for me...but it ain't. So I whack it with a hammer and mold it into something I can deal with.

[rockridge]

Rockridge wrote:

"I'll wait for OS Eleven"...

That rings a little bell. Isn't "Tiger" coming out in a couple/few months... here comes Tiger! Grrr!
len

Yeah i guess, but if we follow that logic, Tiger should be OS Fifteen.

I just think Apple bite off more than it can chew with OSX. Given time, they could make any OS work, but i don't have that kind of time.

No one will ever convince me that the decision to dump OS9 was in the user's interest.

By now, who can believe that Apple wants anyone to use anything other than Logic for music production?

The new version of Windows is called Longhorn and it's due out in a year or so, i believe.

Like Tiger, it will be 64 bit, but it will be tied to the internet like never before.
Probably, they both will be. In fact, there may come a day when we won't be able to use any DAW without an internet connection...

I'm scared already

[Samhein]

I agree with Lee that the software team is probably stretched. But also, what a better way to put more focus on WinXP development, let the Mac OSX team purposely slide to bugsville. Now how difficult will it be for the Mac ProTools to be made "less powerful" or "buggy" ?

[danickstr]

Stadium Rocker...what is your setup big fella?....you say you can run all day and open softsynths. You don't mind sharing more info with us do you? We would love to learn about our misguided ways from a scholar of CPU such as yourself. And maybe get a few wisecracking putdowns at the same time...we just love it all. Please, fill the voids of our minds with your knowledge.