Hollin Jones
A recent Mac meltdown could have spelt disaster, but as Hollin Jones discovered, Apple’s MacBooks have a lot going for them.
It says something about the extent to which technology has taken over the pro audio world that the failure of a computer can bring your world to a screeching halt.
After intimating that I planned to replace my trusty G5 with a new Mac Pro just as soon as Apple released a new model, the G5 started to make strange noises. I think it must have heard what I was planning. As a former Mac technician and regular troubleshooter of all things Apple, especially music related, I have seen and heard my share of oddities. But this one was troubling. The liquid cooling system, long known to be a weak point of the dual 2.5GHz and 2.7GHz models, started for the first time making ‘whooshing’ noises, like water rushing through a sieve. And that’s not something you want to hear coming from inside a computer. After a few days of this, came the inevitable puff of smoke and acrid smell as something important burned out. Some minor disassembly revealed no apparent coolant leakage so it could be the PSU, but either way, it’s not something I can fix easily.
And given the continued non-appearance of the next generation of Mac Pros, this meant swiftly deputising a 2GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook into operation as the main studio machine. Cue a day spent installing lots of audio interface drivers and switching USB hubs, and even buying a display adaptor to run a second screen. Everything went fairly smoothly – I have set up countless studio Macs over the years. But after some fiddling, I came to an interesting realisation.
With a few minor exceptions, the MacBook is as good at running high-end audio software as the G5 was. True there’s no PCI, fewer Ram slots and only a single internal drive, but the heart of the system is remarkably powerful. I recently upgraded the standard hard drive to a 320GB, 7200rpm drive, and the faster spin speed greatly improved performance, though reduced the battery life which isn’t a big problem for me. And it has the maximum 2GB Ram, which helps.
Another interesting point is that the MacBook is running Mac OS X 10.6.2, whereas the G5 was running 10.4.11. The reason is that the G5, as the main studio machine, housed lots of plug-ins. A music Mac is a delicately balanced thing, where a single incompatible plug-in can cause irritating crashes, and a new operating system can often cause time-consuming compatibility problems. So when you get your system, the operating system, drivers and software working in harmony, it’s tempting and even advisable to just leave it alone.
Upgrading an operating system while in the middle of a big project is just inviting disaster, and since I had only recently finished a project that had been running for two years, the G5 stayed on Tiger. The MacBook, on the other hand, was where I experimented, played fast and loose with upgrading the operating system, trying new things. Time Machine means it’s easy, if a little inconvenient, to restore a system if something terminal goes wrong, though that’s extremely rare.
I also realised that as Mac OS X 10.4 has become increasingly obsolete, much of the new software wouldn’t run on it, and I had been using the MacBook more and more anyway. The Intel-only streamlining in Snow Leopard makes 10.4, and especially 10.5, feel sluggish. But it was still amazing to think that a four-year-old ‘consumer’ laptop that cost £1000 could keep pace with a six-year-old top-end desktop system that cost over £2000 and is now an attractive paperweight.
It’s not surprising that the MacBook is Apple’s best selling model of all time. The performance leap from the iBooks and PowerBooks was phenomenal, even if it has not continued at the same pace since. In more recent years, the gap between Apple’s laptops and desktops has widened, and Mac Pros now have far more cores than the laptops, plus the ability to hold much more Ram. Not, as I have remarked, that many applications can use that capacity yet, though Apple’s recent updates to Logic have brought some welcome improvements in terms of its 64-bit capabilities.
As someone who is frequently called upon to spec up Mac systems for musicians, I had always tended to discount laptops and iMacs as serious music machines, mainly because for a long time, the limitations imposed on them either by their design or by Apple’s desire to differentiate its consumer from its professional products meant that they just didn’t have the power.
In light of my own enforced move to using a MacBook full time, however, I have begun to reconsider this assumption. Partly, the improved performance has come about because of internal rather than external changes. Even the lowest end new MacBook, despite no longer having a FireWire port, can officially hold 4GB Ram, and unofficially, 8GB. The MacBook Pros officially hold 8GB and go up as far as 3GHz dual core CPUs, and that’s higher than most desktop PCs. The latest iMacs fare even better, with the big 27in model supporting 16GB Ram and a quad-core processor, though it will cost you a chunk of change. Graphics cards, incidentally, are far less important for audio performance than CPU speed and Ram capacity, at least until programmers begin to leverage Apple’s OpenCL system to offload other types of processing onto the GPU.
Fighting against my in-built preference for tower Macs, I have to admit that Apple’s laptops, iMacs and even a fully-loaded Mac mini now represent serious music making machines for all but the most demanding users. Apple has always claimed, going back years, that its laptops could do the heavy lifting, but they really couldn’t. A PowerBook G4 was no match for a tower G5 and laptops were sketchpads for most producers, for when you couldn’t be in front of the big studio machine. Now the respective bars have been raised so high that the consumer models, loaded with lots of Ram and fast hard drives, really are good enough. Snow Leopard helps a lot too, squeezing extra performance out of the hardware.
For proof of this, on my four-year-old MacBook I’m running several apps as well as a Windows-only sequencing program running inside Windows 7 Ultimate inside a VMware Fusion virtual machine. And it plays back without glitching. That’s not normally how you’d work, it’s fairly convoluted (it’s for file translation in this case), but it demonstrates how far you can go with a basic machine.
As audio peripherals have ditched legacy interface formats like PCI, the smaller, more friendly USB 2 and FireWire formats have become almost ubiquitous. This made it easy to plug the MacBook straight into the rig, since my audio and Midi kit is FireWire based, and the other drives, Midi controllers and bits and pieces run through a USB hub. Crucially, what tends to happen these days is that all your sound sources and Midi devices are gathered together in an interface, mixer or hub before being sent down a single cable, so it’s less important than ever what kind of Mac accepts that connection.
Everyone in the market for a music Mac has different needs and you should do your research before spending any money. But with so much power available for relatively little money and competition among software developers meaning that entry-level versions of their programs are cheap or even free with some hardware products, it’s a great time to get into making music.
Many people will have GarageBand already and while it’s good, anyone going beyond the basics will want to look seriously at Cubase Studio or AI, Logic Express, Pro Tools M-Powered, Propellerhead Record or Ableton Live Lite. If your Mac is only a few years old, you have 2GB or more of Ram and use Mac OS X 10.6, you may find the machine you own is perfectly capable of running your studio.
