Ableton Forum

as a regular user of mac and pc, I can honestly say it doesn't matter.

whatever you choose, you're going to have issues to seriously bitch about, and boast about as well.

my only real advice is that Apple is a much bigger money pit.

hardware upgrades and peripherals for PC's can be found cheap in any computer store's bargain bin.

mac has some "boutique" apps, but PC has more apps.

I'm going to be in the market for a new laptop sometime soon, and I'm most likely going to buy a PC-but ONLY because you get a lot more bang-for-your-buck, and I'm on a very tight budget. If cash was no issue, I'd buy another apple. either way I go, I know there will be no difference in the music i make.

AdamJay wrote:as with anything,
its what you're doing.



firstly, if Person A doesn't know that NI products are written for x86 and merely ported to Mac (and NI performance has always and always will SUCK on MacOS), well then thats Person A's fault for not researching the purchase. .

Why should person A research this? If it says on the box mac/pc then shouldn't that be enough?

because there is still more info to get, and if you're spending money you might want to get all the information regarding your purchase, whats on the box is only going to go so far, akin to judging a politician by the suit he/she is wearing.

Jalope wrote: Why should person A research this? If it says on the box mac/pc then shouldn't that be enough?

if they wanna blow thousands of dollars without researching more than "oh it says OSX on the box, i'll go buy a mac now"
then have at it, but don't expect sympathy from anyone who HAS researched purchases beyond what the box says.

Unreal Tournament is a great example of bad mac code vs. pc code.
on my PB it drags like a 15 year old dog, on my PC with a much worse video card, it flies!
I knew this before i bought my Powerbook, and i'm okay with that.
Had that been a determining factor of my purchase, i would have known not to purchase the Powerbook.

all it would take is 10 minutes of browsing the NI forums or OSXAudio forums to see the large ratio of disgruntled mac vs. pc users to know "hmmm, this stuff really seems to fly on PC instead. maybe i'll stick with my Centrino". That would have taken less effort in the end, don't you think?

Jalope wrote:

AdamJay wrote:as with anything,
its what you're doing.



firstly, if Person A doesn't know that NI products are written for x86 and merely ported to Mac (and NI performance has always and always will SUCK on MacOS), well then thats Person A's fault for not researching the purchase. .

Why should person A research this? If it says on the box mac/pc then shouldn't that be enough?

Bumpy dirt roads with rocks can "support" an indy-500 race car, but it won't run very well on them because it wasn't designed for that type of road.

Crappy analogy, I know, but software development tends to be like that sometimes. The problem is that when using languages like C/C++, they don't often compile or run natively on other platforms, particularly when you're using hooks for specific OS optimizations. All of this has to get "translated" for a successful port over to another OS, which is why products that get ported over generally don't run as well as their native counterparts until the codebase has matured enough on both platforms.

The sticker is there because the marketing department knows it'll help sell the box. That doesn't mean that it's the same product as the native version, though.

sqook wrote:Bumpy dirt roads with rocks can "support" an indy-500 race car, but it won't run very well on them because it wasn't designed for that type of road.

heh

or: i'm pretty sure the boxes containing Windows 3.1/95/98/ME claimed those OS's did all kinds of things they didn't actually do. like, work.

AdamJay wrote:as with anything,
its what you're doing.

the topic starter at KVR was talking about how crap his Apple is when running Reaktor's GoBox and Absynth.

firstly, if Person A doesn't know that NI products are written for x86 and merely ported to Mac (and NI performance has always and always will SUCK on MacOS),

First of all Absynth was originally written on OS9 for mac only. It took x86 loving NI well over a year to port it to windows. Same sort of slow porting they did with their windows first plugs...

NI are just slow at everything they do, including bug fixes. I'm reluctant to say they suck on OSX though. I don't find that to be true for me, and as a Komplete 2 owner, I'm pretty aware of how most of their line up performs. Of course you can get more out of a PC laptop with NI, CPU speed is CPU speed, as the Live 4 test shows....

Personally I waited until last fall to get into NI heavily with Komplete 2, because people started reporting that Reactor was stabilizing in OSX. Absynth has a limit of 16 instances from what I know, and my lowly dual Gig gets that many, so I'm not unhappy with it's performance.

Another point in NI's favor, Kontact 2 coming out soon is altivec enhanced and dual cpu aware......... compare that to Ableton?

In all fairness too the Abe's on your last post on NI and Kontakt 2 etc .... these are plugin's not DAW's with realtime elastic audio properties.
That said I still do not see why the Plugin's in LIVE should not be ALTIVEC optimised for G4 PB users inparticular - this in itself would free up alot of CPU for Mac users.
Personally I wish LIVE 4.1.1 was SSE2 compliant and was coded for a H.T equiped P4 processors - I know it would give me alot more juice than it is now (not that I don't get alot of juice) btu the extra overhead is always welcome IMHO.

I'm getting to the point where I need more overhead and my powerbook is growing weary.

i'm not saying much regarding Live and OSX until we see a post-Tiger Live update...

i've got a hunch things will speed up then. and until then, the last line of my Sig will stay the way it is

AdamJay wrote:i've got a hunch things will speed up then. and until then, the last line of my Sig will stay the way it is

I've been wondering about this.. what exactly is the meaning there?

FaX-01 wrote:In all fairness too the Abe's on your last post on NI and Kontakt 2 etc .... these are plugin's not DAW's with realtime elastic audio properties.
That said I still do not see why the Plugin's in LIVE should not be ALTIVEC optimised for G4 PB users inparticular - this in itself would free up alot of CPU for Mac users.

OK case in point. On my 800mhz powerbook, with Live 4 I can get 5 instances of Absynth running before the audio turns to mush and noise. In Logic I can get 8. Then just for fun I rewired a 10 audio track Live set into Logic, and called up all 8 instances of Absynth, no problems. Proceeded to pitch and time stretch in Live [edited: said Absynth by mistake oops! ] with the 8 instances of Absynth runnning......... So they might just be plug ins, but it's certainly not Live's ability to stretch audio elastically that is making Live 4 such a pig when it comes to plug ins, or necessarily NI's windows centric ways.
So yeah I agree, Live should be altivec enhanced! It's definitely in my not so humble opinion, why Logic beats it so badly in performance.

sqook wrote: I've been wondering about this.. what exactly is the meaning there?

AdamJay wrote:

sqook wrote: I've been wondering about this.. what exactly is the meaning there?

tease.