You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin...
From the original Analog Industries archive. Some links and images from that era no longer resolve.
Spent an entertaining morning sniping at the Apple Mavericks announcement yesterday. Right up until the point where Craig Federighi said “Free. Today.” Once I got done wiping the orange juice off my MacBook Pro, I settled in for the usual nightmare.
Now, to be clear, I in no way _want_ to upgrade OS X. Ever. But the nature of Audio Damage’s product line makes it so I have to, the second it comes out. So as soon as a new version of OS X is available, it’s off to the salt mines for me. I strongly suggest (and not for the last time in this post) that you absolutely do not follow my lead.
First things first: there is no reason whatsoever to upgrade to Mavericks. Aside from all the memory compression fapping (which doesn’t affect us, not being idle users of memory) and pipeline this and yadda-yadda that, there is nothing in Mavericks that will improve your songwriting skills or make your DAW run better. At all. Just don’t bother. What you get, for all intents and purposes, are tabbed finder windows (which don’t work as well as TotalFinder’s do) an update to Calendar, and a mediocre mapping app. If an hours-long update process to get some kind of shitty tabbed finder windows is how you want to spend your time, knock yourself out. Otherwise, don’t do it. Not today.
Since you’re gonna ignore my advice and do it anyhow, here’s what I’ve discovered so far:
All Audio Damage plug-ins, both 32- and 64-bit, swallow the update seamlessly. They are, as best we can tell, unaffected by Mavericks, which doesn’t touch the folders they live in.
I did cursory checks of some other plug-ins. I had a couple crashes with Maschine when trying to load kits. Other NI stuff seems fine. I’m personally having some issues with FXpansion plugs, but I don’t know if this is me or Mavericks or what. Studio One Two crashes on instance. Plogue Bidule seems to work fine. Max/MSP 6 (and M4L) require a Java update, but otherwise work fine.
So, spotty, basically. If you want to dick around with crashes and strange performance, and some plugs not working, by all means, update. If you have a show coming up, or are in the middle of a project, and you update, you’re stupid, and I don’t want to be your friend. You deserve all the problems you’re having.
30 comments
It's refreshing for an OS X update not to break nearly everything.
That being said, I'm still at 10.7.5 on my work machine and have no appetite for updates, even though we treat our OSX machines like fancy Linux boxes.
Thanks for the info Chris. Although the Mac in our house (my wife's) is not used for music, I'll tell her to hold off anyway.
Meanwhile, my "free" Windows 8.1 upgrade has been chewing up what little free time I have. Shame on me for assuming a .1 release would not break things like automated backups to my home server. I'm still trying to find out if it can be fixed or was purposely removed by Microsoft. If on purpose, I'm going to have to do a reinstall of Win 7 or Win 8 and stick with that until I come up with a different backup solution. Haven't even checked to see what of my music stuff might have been broken yet.
I haven't done the 8.1 update yet. I just assumed it, like all Windows updates to date, didn't really affect anything audio-wise. (Our original Mayhem release, created before Vista was even announced, still runs fine on my Win8 machine, for instance. The OS X version doesn't work at all and hasn't for years.)
I may check that, but I'm loathe to as my Win8 machine is my main production machine for both AD work and music. Perhaps I'll do some research there.
-CR
@theoryzero -- at least you can upgrade. Both my windows live login and windows 8 store stopped working for no reason when I tried to do an install.
Of course Windows 8 is a mixed bag of awesome and stupid -- the Video app has never been able to play a video for me. And no one at MSFT seems to have a clue why. Or care. They probably all use VLC too.
Yeah, most of the tiled apps totally suck. I really like the tile screen, but I have a gigantic multi-touch monitor just for the driver's seat, and that's what the tile screen was designed for. It works well in that context.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/chrisrandall/10364137195/
But the video, audio, PDF, text apps... Jesus christ, they're awful. Take forever to start, impossible to close, and they only work like 10% of the time.
-CR
Since I didn't make it clear, 10.8 is a _very_ good version of OS X. As is 10.6.8. I would have no problems whatsoever recommending someone go to 10.8 from 10.6.x right now. Skip 10.7 entirely. It is the Windows Vista of Mac OS. Totally pointless, totally shitty, and totally useless.
-CR
I have to say that if you use more than one monitor, like, ever, mavs is a massive, mandatory update. The off screen g world was for the fucking birds. - JC
I did the upgrade on a Retina Macbook Pro i have here in hopes that the "advanced power management" might allow me to get more than 1 hour battery life while i wait for Apple to replace the unit.
My FXpansion plugs are no longer authorized.
Is that the issue you are having Chris?
BTW - still no battery life so that was a wasted hour.
I'm still running Win7, wasn't all that temted to upgrade to 8, with 8.1 I'm not so sure...
Metro part of it aside, people seem to be liking its desktop as in - it works better as the one in Win7 (newer, optimized...).
True? Worth upgrading?
I'm using StudioOne 2.something and have a legit Win8 serial somewhere (bought it while it was 39$.
k
Yes, myrnaloy, that's the exact same problem I'm having.
-CR
@klemen -- there's no show-stopping reason to upgrade to windows 8. From what I've read on the internet it's better optimized for performance and has some bug fixes relative to Windows 7. Might also have better native support for new tech like USB3. But if you're happy using Windows 7, I can't think what I use that you're missing.
And doing the upgrade does fux0r some of your software registrations, particularly anything by IK Multimedia, which are relatively annoying to re-license. I'm very close to having to beg them to reset my license counters, just from various upgrades/hardware changes on my studio box.
Thanks, I guess I'll upgrade just before W9 comes out then (if for nothing else, just to keep my stuff working).
I do use some IK stuff and hope they fix their authorization system. I've never had any problem with Gforce or AudioDamage stuff, glad to say.
...and back to Chris...
@chaircrusher
Agreed, Win 8 is a mixed bag. I largely had no problem adopting it, despite being happy with 7. The Tile apps, as mentioned, do suck though.
The little 8.1 improvements I actually like for my desktop PC are that I can boot straight to the desktop and I can use the desktop background for the tiled Metro window so it looks more like a cohesive experience. Very small, superficial improvements.
They changed the tile color for non-Metro apps to be some amalgamation of what they determine the primary icon color to be. So, it may analyze an icon and determine it has lots of orange in it, so it will choose the standard orange color for that tile. For my tile screen, this results in a rather horrid array of colors. Adobe Illustrator, for example, has been designated to have this awful orange color, which doesn't really match up with the orange in the original icon. Yuck. I guess I'd rather stick with the same blah non-color for all non-Metro apps. Sadly you cannot turn it off. I get that they tried to make my tiles more colorful, but this is an awful design approach. Why not let me make my own tiles?
Also, adding the "Start" button back without an option to get rid of it is equally lame. I like keyboard shortcuts, I don't need the superfluous icon on my toolbar. They also have added some tips to help new users who were no doubt perplexed when using Windows 8 for the first time. I think this is good in general, but it seems bugged. Since I use a Wacom tablet for Photoshop work, it assumes I can swipe. No can do, my tablet does not support swiping or gestures. There appears to be no way to get rid of the largish "tip" window telling me to swipe, I can't click and close it. I have to unplug my tablet and it goes away immediately. As soon as I plug it in, it's back. The tip window covers up a few inches of my screen, so it's annoying.
Oh, and launching the Event Viewer results in a crash because it can't find some log file. I can still view other logs but it seems largely unhappy.
I'm surprised with all of the issues with 8.1, feels like it needed some more polish before release. Since the things I actually like are pretty small things, it seems like going back to 8.0 might be what I need to do.
Klemen - The major difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8 desktop is that Win8 is tweaked to take advantage of SSDs much better. Remember, SSDs weren't really a thing when Win7 launched. There are some other relatively minor performance tweaks here and there, but that's the big one. If you are just running platter drives, Win7 is fine. If you are running an SSD as you primary drive, Win8 is the easy choice.
thanks for the heads up on mavericks CR.
Personally I like Windows 8 a bit better than Windows 7. The Metro/Start screen is an abomination, though; I don't use it at all and haven't for months. Thanks to this freeware addition: http://www.classicshell.net/ I boot straight to the Desktop (which 8.1 can but 8.0 can't) and have a Start menu that's as good as, or better than, the one in Windows 7. (With much fanfare, 8.1 restored the Start item on the taskbar. All it does is take you to the useless Start screen. I don't know why they bothered.)
Once at the Desktop, I think some of the newer features (e.g. changes to the explorer windows) make it nicer for day-to-day use than Win 7. I can't say much about its performance, other than that it seems to start up faster than 7.
I am, as I type, updating my secondary PC to 8.1. If that doesn't go horribly awry, I'll do my music PC and my main PC.
--Adam
What's the take on major OS X upgrades? For example, 10.7 to 10.9. Does the "upgrade" option really work, or is a clean reinstall necessary? Because a clean reinstall on my music-making computers would suck to the point of, uh, thanks but no thanks. Ain't broke, don't fix.
I've never done a clean re-install to upgrade on OS X. I have a couple times on Windows, but as you say, that's so un-fun on a music computer as to be basically quixotic.
This OS X install I'm writing on started life as a 10.4 install on the very first Intel iMac. It has been upgraded to current, and migrated across 6 computers, without ill results.
-CR
Had a disappointment with a not too old DELL laptop which runs Windows 8 Pro with no problems. The upgrade assistant said the 8.1 update requires a new BIOS, which doesn't seem to be a priority for DELL to provide. I wonder if that's something to do with 8.1 being a pro version and some deep security setting that only the NSA understands?
@darklordjames - yeah, my system drive is a SSD drive (120GB, rather full ATM).
@Chris - I'd prefer to do clean install by all means, but all the registrations (IK and Sibelius being the main offenders) and Komplete 9 Ultimate + extra libraries if needed...yay, I'll probably wait some more. Although I'm not in the middle of anything important right now, so...
k
I watched the Apple presentation and when I learned it was free, I updated without thinking. I'm not proud of it.
Have not had any problems yet.
I want a new macbook pro.
- c
I had a spare machine - I just updated one mac (like two weeks ago) with a newer one, so my old one still has nearly all the same software on it and isn't a production box.
(I set it to upgrade before you go to sleep. That way when I got up, it's done. Doing that the upgrade took me exactly 15 minutes of interactive time. I don't know how long the actual install took. The download was kinda painful, tho.)
Here's what broke for me:
My 3-year-old version of VMWare fusion.
So far, that's it. Ableton 8 and 9, Logic 9 and X, and all 150-or-so plugins seemed happy. So far. It's not outside the realm of possibility that stuff will break in circumstances beyond my day of testing.
I still gotta check Waveburner and Illustrator, and I couldn't fire up my ancient copy of Photoshop without first installing a new Java Runtime.
Just had a go with our stuff in Garageband X, which is totally sandboxed. They don't initially work, but there is a work-around that Sean Costello figured out. I'll detail it in a separate post if we can't immediately fix our installers to deal with it.
If they work here, that means they work in Logic X Sandboxed. Theoretically.
-CR
i spec'd out a new macbook pro and it came to $3727. wtf. fastest CPU and 1TB of storage, 16 GB ram, external superdrive and applecare.
seems unreasonable to me. especially w/no user upgradable things. only at time of purchase.
i hope my quadcore mac pro from 2010 lasts forever. i see a hackintosh or suped up mac mini in my future.
ugh.
as for mavericks.. i'll not find out until i have to. all you devs get to do the leg work there obviously. i also expect various developers to raise prices on mac plug ins over the next year or so.. maybe $5-10 or something.. a little extra pinch for the man hours that get recycled into OSX plugs again and again.
Mine was max-specced in January (?) and came out to $3299 + tax. (No AppleCare, which is a fucking rip-off.) I have to say that it is a hell of a machine. You pay a premium with higher-end MacBook Pros, but you get what you pay for.
I won't complain about build quality or cost of their laptops. The new Mac Pro looks like a screamer. I have enough to complain about with their stupid operating system dumbing-down procedures.
-CR
lols
i can't recall how much my macbook pro cost. i had a top of line 2008 model that went tits up 3 times (apparently not uncommon to this year) and apple lived up to their end of the applecare deal and provided me w/a brand new top of line MBpro quad core to replace it.. so i hardly have any room to complain. on that day i was beaming with happiness and love for all things apple as i walked out of the store w/a spanking new machine.
current mac pro i have is quad core i bought used or (new old stock) from a retailer.. i suspect that's what i'll do again unless i go for the tonymacx86 hackintosh sixcore..
as for the OS.. frack... the app store.. double frack.. all the potential pitfalls and speed bumps.. i hope it all shakes out in a not too super shitty way for devs as well as users.
I'm with boobs.
I have had amazing experiences with Applecare. I wouldn't get it for a desktop, but for a laptop I wouldn't do without.
Applecare for me seems to run the Murphy's Law route. Most times I have bought it, have not used it. The times I haven't, well....sucks to be me. I'm not sure what my friends and I do to our machines, but even some towers have been through a couple of logic board replacements etc....
Chris - your last line of this had me laughing hard - and it hits the nail on the head. Should be a sticky for all DAW software and plugin companies!
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