I am a documentary film maker working with Final Cut Pro, so my system needed to be a Mac. After about six months of research, I went with a G4 Ti 800 mHz Powerbook with 1 gig ram, mainly because I would be running FCP, Peak DV and Photoshop in OS X. Therefore, my audio needs would have to conform to my decision to go with OS X.
At the advice of a well known producer that has worked with The Chemical Brothers and Canada's David Usher (a recent no. 1 single in Canada sounds like it used Live), I purchased Live and Reason together, (along with my personal choices of a USB Quattro/Omni interface, and an external Lacie 120 gig firewire HD, which runs at 7200 rpm). He warned me about the growing pains that OS X was experiencing in the audio area, but my experiences with it in other capacities convinced me that OS X was the wave of the future. At the time, those experiences were limited to OS 10.1.5, the first (I believe) OS X with core audio, but a far cry from Jaguar. Once Jaguar came out, it was unbelievable what happened to my video and graphic design suite: everything became sort of "liquefied", if you will, and so rock solid that I can be running massive 40 gig video files in full screen view with dual monitors, audio plug-ins, etc. in Final Cut Pro, and still do several real-time edits with no problems. This lead me to a conviction based upon real world experience: once Apple sorts out their audio system, including assisting developers better, they are going to produce a dream OS for seamless integration between multiple apps.
Of course many are not interested in tomorrow; they only think about today, and things are far from perfect right now. So it would be easy to lack foresight and jump ship to a PC-based system. But I believe that Apple is a company that thinks like artists, and their recent acquisitions prove that they are investing heavily in the future of audio production. That convinces me that my investment in Apple is in concert with my personal development goals.
So, I brought home my new software, installed the Quattro drivers into OS X 10.2, and then installed Reason and Live 1.5.2. I plugged in my keyboard, and loaded Live with Reason as a slave. I have never used either program before, but after setting the preferences as per the manuals, I was making music right away. My Powerbook ran for twelve hours that day, without one crash, running a dozen tracks of audio and a dozen devices in Reason with lots of effects.
Then came the Live 2.0 upgrade, and I couldn't resist. As I have no other sequencer, the new features were crucial to me. Since I had missed qualifiying for the free upgrade by two weeks, I paid the fee and downloaded the program. I installed it right away and got to work.
As soon as I recorded an audio track using "Live In" - in this case it was a live female vocalist - the system would crash if I tried to play back a take. Several crashes and hours later, I discovered that if I saved the file before I tried to trigger the clip, then no crashes.
Since that time, I have worked in Live for at least 300 hours without a crash. I save on the fly continuously, like some sort of nervous twitch, but everything else is stable, which keeps me making music.
I have run my Powerbook for 14 and 16 hour sessions, and the fan barely ever comes on. One MacWorld tester kept his Powerbook running for 3 days and it still didn't overheat. The monitor is razor thin, big and bright. I can't speak for everybody, but the vibe of the Powerbook just syncs with my nature. Perhaps it is my graphics background, but unless something feels right to me visually, I can't spend thousands of hours interfacing with it. Live and OS X have become a great combo for me, and I have been spending countless nights absorbed into one song or another.
Live and OS X have a lot in common: both are young and beautiful, and hold what I believe is the golden key to the future of audio. But being young, they are also a little bit unaware of themselves (the code, man, the code!), which should improve with time. By all accounts, it is a sure thing. And those of us who helped finance them through their adolesence will truly be partners of a sort, and the dividends we collect will be the great music we produce. It's all about the music!
