Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

Weird, could try opening disk utility and verifying/replairing disk permissions.

Am in Docklands. Need to buy USB hard drive from a shop. Any ideas where to go?

Hi all,

Anyone here clued up on Macs?

I am after a Macbook Pro for music production (finally making the switch from Windows PC), but I am unsure the spec to go for.

Budget is around £1500 so that gives me the choice of the 13" and 15" laptops. The 15" comes with a quad core processor and 4gb ram whereas the 13" i'd go for would be the dual core (faster processor) and 8gb ram.

Taken off website
13-inch: 2.7 GHz
2.7GHz dual-core
Intel Core i7
8GB 1333MHz (upgraded)
500GB 5400-rpm1
Intel HD Graphics 3000

OR

15-inch: 2.0 GHz
2.0GHz quad-core
Intel Core i7
4GB 1333MHz
500GB 5400-rpm1
Intel HD Graphics 3000
AMD Radeon HD 6490M with 256MB GDDR5

Any advice on the better option? Would be running Garage Band along with Final Cut Studio with external sound card, drives and inputs.

Cheers

not about to start Mac bashing, but why the switch from a Windows PC?

Will get the uni discount - 15% off and 1/4 of the price for warranty; will check the for sale threads.

Regards the PC switch - my current laptop is poorly designed and cant be plugged in when running external devices through the expansion slot (currently running a Mackie Onyx). Always had problems with PCs in the past and have a couple of Macs at home which i much prefer

has this been resolved?

I think so, yes.
I've certainly had no problems watching 4od on my mac for the last 2 years or so.

Quad-core all the way....

The dual cores are very fast but the quads are incredible!

You can upgrade the ram at a later date but if you plump for the dual core, you can't upgrade the processor.

i can clap with my feet :)

i went for the 13inch because i can carry it in my bag.

Aserota, if you're going to be doing music production, you will need to up the speed of the hard drive. 5400RPM will greatly reduce your track count. 7200RPM will be fine, and that's really the only drove speed that would be supported in Pro Tools etc.

it really does depend on the music you want to produce, as to what specs you need on the mac. I've been building PC, and selling Macs for years. Feel free to drop me a PM with what you want to achieve and what software you want to use, and I'll give you some feedback.

Go for the quad core, also the quad core has dedicated graphics rather than built in.

not about to start Mac bashing, but why the switch from a Windows PC?

The way MACs handle the drivers for soundcards is much better than the asio drivers for pc's. Infact the drivers are built in to the MAC OS and have a much lower latency to similar powered PC's

The way MACs handle the drivers for soundcards is much better than the asio drivers for pc's. Infact the drivers are built in to the MAC OS and have a much lower latency to similar powered PC's

Absolute poppy cock! that's really not true.

Absolute poppy cock! that's really not true.

sooo when i'm working on music on my pc and the soundcard becomes unresponsive i have to reboot the PC and wait 5 mins. But when the same happens on my mac (and this has happened only a few times) I only have to unplug the usb and plug it in again and it then starts working again with out the need to reboot?

And also my 4 year old mac laptop has a much lower latency than my newish pc with the same soundcard?

The drivers for PC's are absolutely SHIT

What's the soundcard?

As is usually the case with PC's there can be hundreds of variable, whereas the MACs come straight out of the box. Without wanting to throw stones it sounds like you haven't set the PC up correctly, and therefore it's thrown up issues of that nature.

ASIO in it's very nature is designed to bypass everything to do with audio on the windows OS. it can be interupted, or the chipset (Via, Nvidia etc) could be cheap, and have poor USB drivers generally. If the ASIO drivers are well written then latency will be as little an issue as it is on MAC

The fact that PCs and MACs now share the same chipsets (intel), and I don't mean the CPU, means that the playing field is very flat between them.

With the right parts you can get a PC to perform as well if not better than a Mac at a fraction of the price. Trust me, I've done it.

Your bad experiences don't make the rule.

The same has been happening across many soundcards.

but I have been using this one recently - http://www.camdensounds.co.uk/audio-interfaces/edirol-ua-101-usb-audio-interface.html

You've described the problem exactly. With PC's you have to spend your time tweeking/setting up but with macs you get great results straight out of the box with out having to install bulky drivers.

AND almost the most important thing is that the workflow is MUCH better on a MAC which is more to do with the OS than the hardware.

CS5.5? Wtf?

No back-saving to CS5 options (InD) and no updating to 5.5 options.

Why?
Gah.
and a
!

sure about that? is this a case of ticking the 'don't show again' box and forgetting you ever had the choice?

Not sure back saving would be a dialogue box?

We have a temp in and have hired a mac, so we're using trial CS5. Turns out to be CS5.5 which we can't open on CS5.
There are plug ins for updates but they don't work.

When you save it asks whether you want to maintain compatibility with older versions. The dialog has a "stop nagging me" checkbox which causes it to remember whether you said "yes" or "no".
perhaps it remembers being told "no"

Still, why not install trial 5.5?

Oh it does? That's lazy. Temp must have turned it off. Meh.

Would be silly to install a trial 5.5 for the rest of the team, especially when we've just bought 5 for us all.

Cheers both, sorry I doubted you MrSmyth. Off to find the 'reset warning dialogs' option.

unfortunatly cs5 is not saveable for older versions :(

hi, can someone help me?
I just got the cs5 suite on my mac os 10.5.8 and everything apart from indesign is running, it seems weird that for indesign it says the my mac does not fulfil the hardware/software requirements?
any idea what I could do?
cheers!
jeannette

unfortunatly cs5 is not saveable for older versions :(

You can only back save to CS4.

So in InD I reset all warning dialogues, restarted, saved and nothing. Do I need to trash the library prefs?