You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin...

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.