adolescent wrote:
@bloodline
That's fine that you consider the audio system mission critical for your work. What I am looking for is an objective reason that MacOSX is technically better than Windows XP/Vista. You said latency which is subjective,
I assure you it is not subjective, I have to set up my latency compensation very carefully to ensure synchronisation between my equipment. MacOS audio subsystem, fittingly titled "Core Audio", allows me to set up the sample rate and buffer size very specifically to give a set latency... on my MacBook Pro with a 10-In 10-Out Edirol FA-101 fire wire audio interface, at a sample rate of 48Khz I can get 3.43ms in and about the same out... without any audio glitching...
Core Audio also features a modular DSP component system called Audio Units... these can be inserted anywhere within any Audio stream to provide Effects or Synthetics... I can load the system up with these until both CPU cores are maxed out... These Audio Units also offer network transparency, which mean that two Macs can send Audio and Event data over a network transparent to the user... This allows distributed audio processing and sending... Gigabit Ethernet offers fairly low latency, any thing under 9ms is usable... I've tried Wifi (n) and can get about about 15ms latency, which is just about usable for live... but not for the studio...
Windows has nothing as advanced as any of this. I am aware that Vista has introduced a new Audio system but it is incompatible with existing software... and certainly isn't as advanced.
-Edit- I've just read about Vista's new WaveRT audio component that tries to address the above issues, but doesn't work with Firewire or USB audio interfaces... Which pretty much rules out every audio interface a musician would want to use... and certainly rules out laptops, which have revolutionised the music industry.
and crashes which sound like operator error,
Certainly possible, but when I transferred to Mac, I tried to recreate the Windows setup completely, using the same software (music software tends to have both Win and Mac Versions) and the same music hardware/synths.
The Mac system was rock solid...
To be fair I am usually running a hell of a lot of software at the same time...
a bad computer,
Again possible, it was just a midrange Acer...
or just FUD (every OS can crash..).
I never said MacOS X doesn't crash, What I said was that I can rely on it. If I set up a configuration and run it in rehearsals, I know it will function on stage.
With a Windows set up, It might run fine in rehearsals but then it would crap out on stage... Rehearsals have a lot more stop starts than live, where a machine will be powered up for sound check... then left until Performance where it will need to bang through the set at whatever pace were are running at that night. I need to be able to trust it.
If you had proof that the same audio hardware on like systems, one running Windows and one running OSX, ran differently then I might take it a bit more serious.
Usual set up consists of Logic Pro (which was Logic Platinum 5 back in those days), Ableton, Reason and a couple Arturia Softsynths.
All software (with the exception of more recent versions of Logic) are available on both platforms... feel free to try it out for yourself!
I forget the hardware I as using, but I can dig up my old Keytech tour lists...
The "99% of all professional musicians use MacOSX" falls in the same category. It sounds too made up to be true. Care to site a source?
Just try and find a Musician/DJ that doesn't use a Mac!?!?!
Regarding your security comment, you don't really know Windows. Windows 9x had a single user security model. NT and later all have separate roles for user and administrator. In the end, if the operator chooses to run as root they can do so just like they can in OSX. Vista has the UAC which is similar to the OSX prompt when root access is required.
This has already been answered by Trev.
