Hollin Jones
Macs have proven to be so reliable when used as part of a live music show that it’s always a surprise to see a band or sound engineer using a PC.
I remember the first time I realised just how far ahead of Microsoft Apple was in the music and multimedia game. A few years ago, I was part of a small team that staged an interactive jazz performance at a media centre cum cinema in Bristol. It involved a fairly well-known (in jazz circles at least) saxophonist improvising to a backing track, but facing three large screens while he did so. Onto these screens were projected the video outputs of three Macs running SoundJam, the software that Apple would shortly thereafter buy and turn into iTunes. Nothing too exciting about that, I hear you cry. Well perhaps not now, but at the time it was unusual enough to draw a crowd of several hundred paying audience members. There wasn’t a spare seat in the house.
The setup was relatively simple in hindsight, although what we were trying was new enough that it took a while to figure out how to do it. Three G4 towers – the fastest Macs at the time – would run a combination of SoundJam and a specially created Macromedia Director movie. To our eternal relief, SoundJam could be made to read from the Mac’s audio input and featured a visualiser that would respond to the frequency and amplitude of the audio it received.
These days, of course, this is kid’s stuff: iTunes has always had it. But when it was part of SoundJam, hardly anyone knew about it. The excellent Director, now largely sidelined by Flash, enabled us to use our rudimentary coding skills to build a movie that read sound, and loaded images and played video clips, again based on the tone and volume of the music played by the saxophonist. For his part, he simply had a microphone and faced the screens. And he did what jazz guys do best – improvised. To add to the mix, we used Arkaos Visualizer to manually load up clips and apply video effects to them.
The Macs, which were running Mac OS 9, had to be modified for the job. We had to get second video cards so that both a monitor and a feed to the projector could be used from each one. Some complex vision mixing and Scart hubs took the video feeds and, if memory serves, we simply ran the audio out of the headphone jacks on the back of the G4s into a mixer and on to some amplifiers and a good PA system. I cringe at the thought of using headphone mini jacks now and would steadfastly refuse to do so again, but at the time, USB and FireWire audio interfaces were more or less non-existent and the alternative was to get a PCIbased audio card for each Mac – a luxury we couldn’t afford, especially since there wasn’t even money to cover our expenses, let alone pay us lowly techies. There were other tweaks as well – stuff like creating a screensaver that was just a black image that filled the screen, because we couldn’t make the projectors output nothing – they would show a menu screen.
A friend of mine, who was at that time rabidly pro Windows and anti Mac, came along to watch the rehearsals and the show. Not in any way because he hoped it would fail. On the contrary, I think he didn’t quite believe that anything involving computers and live performance could go without a hitch. Remember that this was back in 2000, when things were a bit different.
Anyway the show went off without a hitch and afterwards he came up to me and said with brutal honesty: ‘I would never, ever have attempted anything like that with PCs.’ Why? Because it would almost certainly have gone badly wrong in front of several hundred people. Windows even manages a blue screen of death when Bill Gates is on TV talking about it. Can you imagine Mac OS X throwing a kernel panic during one of Steve Jobs’ keynotes? Not really.
As a happy footnote, over the next few years, the friend in question became gradually more and more pro Mac, and now owns an iPhone, MacBook and Mac Pro, using the computers as the basis of a career in 3D animation. It’s probably for the best I didn’t tell him at the time that about a minute after we had finished the show, one G4, still attached to the main projector started indexing itself. I had forgotten to turn off indexing. Anyone who remembers Mac OS 9 will remember that once it had started, indexing was tricky to stop in a hurry. We were two minutes from a medium-sized Snafu.
That, though, was a decade ago. Since then, there have been six major revisions of Mac OS X, the last three seriously usable. If we felt comfortable enough to do a live music performance using Mac OS 9 back then, we’d not have believed how stable Mac OS X would end up being in comparison, even if someone had told us. And, yes, Windows 7 is more stable than Windows 2000 would have been, but would many people seriously attempt something like that with it even now? Of course someone would, but I’d imagine they would be on eggshells the whole time. When it’s live, there’s nowhere to hide. Putting your reputation in the hands of Windows in a live situation would, in my opinion, be madness. It’s just not designed to do anything creative. Audio and Midi in any professional sense have always been bolt-ons for Windows. It was only with Vista that any low-latency audio stuff was added. Mac OS 9 had bolt-ons, too (anyone remember OMS?), but Mac OS X has always had CoreAudio and CoreMidi – solid frameworks built deep into the system that developers can use and rely on to make stable drivers and software.
I was at a big live music show in London very recently and noticed that not only did the band have MacBook Pros on stage with them – and this was essentially a rock band, not a dance outfit – but the front of house mixing desk was also using a Mac mini to control the light show and a MacBook to record a feed from the mixing desk into Pro Tools. The only time I’m surprised these days is on the very odd occasion that I see a band or sound engineer using a computer in a live situation that isn’t a Mac. I don’t remember precisely the moment when I stopped worrying about the stability of Mac OS X when standing, alone, in front of an expectant crowd, but it was after installing and running 10.6 for a while that I suddenly realised I hadn’t had a crash of any kind for quite a while.
With a tried and tested setup, I have no qualms whatsoever about performing in front of a crowd with a MacBook as part of the setup, as long as they don’t get too rowdy and look like spilling beer on it. This happens unless you’re really careful. Paradoxically, it can happen when you’re too effective at getting a crowd going. But if you manage to fend off the drunks, at least you don’t have to worry about your Mac letting you down.
