For the past three weeks I've been taking a summer course on how
to create electronic music using the computer. It's a very
interesting course, and I've learned a lot.
I've also learned how many times Mac OS 9 can crash in two
hours. The computers we have access to are eMacs running Mac OS 9.2. They certainly
look nice. The screens are bright and sharp - and they're very
fast.
Unfortunately, that's where the pleasure of using one of these
machines ends.
Mac OS 9, compared to other operating systems three years ago,
wasn't too bad. It didn't crash too often if you had it properly
configured - but if anything was corrupt, it would crash just as
badly as Windows would.
These days, it's a little bit outdated compared to Mac OS X
but still not too unstable.
My beige G3 tower, running OS 9.2,
rarely crashes. Of course, the most intensive application I really
use on it is Photoshop - believe it or not, it's never crashed with
that running. The only thing that seems to cause crashes is
Internet Explorer (somehow that doesn't surprise me). Even AOL
hardly ever causes problems (connecting to AOL via TCP/IP and
staying connected is another thing entirely, though).
Mac OS 9 is stable, of course, if you're not pushing it too
much. The software we've been using in the course was ProTools,
Sound
Studio, and SoundHack. Each seems to
have their noticeable bugs. For example, Sound Studio won't let you
preview things without the computer crashing. ProTools won't open
if Sound Studio is open. It's the little things that all add up -
and then when one program, has a glitch the whole system
crashes.
Everyone knows how much fun it is to redo something you were
working on when the system crashed, even though you were just about
to click Save when it went down. Even the idea of save often
doesn't work - when you save, it crashes! Unfortunately, the free
version of ProTools (which is what we used) doesn't run in Mac
OS X, so they're stuck using OS 9.
The problem, I think, is not so much a buggy OS or buggy
hardware, but buggy software. Apparently there is a new version of
ProTools available, and I am only hoping that it isn't as bad as
the version we used.
The course director talked about some of the other alternatives
to ProTools,
Cubase and Logic
Audio being the main two. I've had a chance to play around
with Cubase a little bit, and it seems to be slightly better than
ProTools - and definitely more stable. If I do decide to get into
electronic music, I'll probably end up using Cubase.
I've heard some bad things about Mac OS X and audio software,
especially OS X's MIDI capabilities (although this course didn't
really go heavily into using MIDI). Most of the current hardware
attachments seem to be USB or FireWire, so I won't be able to use
them with my beige G3 unless I decide to add a USB/FireWire card -
and I'm not sure how much more money I want to put into that
computer, considering I recently upgraded the RAM and added a new
hard disk.
This, of course, leaves me with my PowerBook, which only runs Mac OS X.
I'm sure any issues with OS X will be solved in the future,
but in the meantime, since I can't boot 9 on my PowerBook, I'll
just have to wait.
