[78-L] Audio - Mac vs PCs - any advice? (rjh334578gmail)

[J. E. Knox]

Greetings from FixitLand!

Joe Salerno wrote:

> I am curious what it is about the Macs that attracted you and what has 
> kept you.

For starters: Ease of use, reliability (I have a 23-year-old Mac that boots right up and is quite usable), freedom from virus hassles (I haven't had to run anti-virus software in nearly 20 years). My workplace has been Mac-centric since its beginning in 1984.

I have written software for both platforms (as well as in DOS back in the 1980s), and found it much easier to deal with the Mac Toolbox than the Windows API. The latter is a convoluted, bloated mess. It's a wonder that any peecee program works as well as it does. The elegance of the Mac OS, in contrast, is a wonder. That won't mean much to you if you're not a programmer.

Recent Macs can run both Mac OS applications and Windows applications, so a Mac is like having two machines in one. (That means you wouldn't have to lose all your old peecee apps.) The same is not true of a peecee, though there is supposedly a workaround for it (messy).

One of the main objections to Apple products has been their higher price. The usual answer to that is that Ferraris cost more than Fords. I won't belabor that point except to say that Mac prices are more competitive than they used to be.

A point in favor of the peecee is that it can be easily customized and upgraded. So can the Mac Pro, but that is also Apple's premium machine. The lower-priced iMac is an all-in-one computer-in-the-screen box to which you can't add cards and such. People involved with heavy-duty audio processing usually like to install high-end sound cards in their computers, and you'd need a Mac Pro to do this on the Apple platform. Now, is that an issue? The built-in audio on most Macs has been more than adequate for my needs. I would defer to folks like Doug Pomeroy for the heavy-duty stuff.

I use a 12-year-old Power Mac G4 tower for my audio work, with Sound Studio shareware audio editor, the Brian Davies audio apps (ClickRepair, DeNoise, Equalizer) and a handful of other apps. (Amadeus is also an excellent audio editor.) Audacity runs on Macs...sorta. I have had crashing errors with it, but it does offer some nice features (and FREE is a very good price).

Best advice? Go to a dealer and play with a Mac. We can all tell you our experiences, but you should try one for yourself before adopting or condemning it. The computer you buy has to suit YOU, not us.

[Oh, and by the way..."Mac" is short for Macintosh..."MAC" is short for "media access control" (as in a MAC address). Peecee-users tend to refer to a Mac as a MAC for some reason, as if the term were an acronym.]

Take care,


—
Joe
—
“One day I was counting the cats and I absent-mindedly counted myself.” — Bobbie Ann Mason (Shiloh and Other Stories)


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