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]

OS X is awsome in many ways

Music ain't one of them. At least it sure wasn't when I started this thread, and, for my money, it still ain't.

OS X is awesome in the ways that UNIX was awesome 15 years ago; Jobs and Apple finally caught the train. Hell, way back in 1986 the beleagured and lowly Amiga had multiple processors, full multitasking, interlaced video, video I/O, key-switchable *screens* (not just windows), and both a GUI and CLI--all right out of the box! Gates and Apple did all they could to bury that machine at a time when Macs and PeeCees could barely single-task for 4-times the money. With plenty of help from the incompetent, if not criminally negligent, management at C=, they succeeded. Now 18 years later independent programmers are writing HAXIES for OS X Macs just to get switchable screens, and the mosh-pit is going, "Wowwwwww, man!"

And now Apple has bought up a monopoly on Logic, and is saying: "You paid our gouge-price for the hardware and for the free version of UNIX we *finally* incorporated and are profitting from, now you want to make music? Okay--after three years of keeping you waiting, here is your dongle; come on, just put it in for us. It will be soooo good." So now you got to marry the company and become a dongle-wife too. And pay exorbitantly for the privilege.

Awesome? My thesaurus has other adjectives, but not suitable for this forum.