Ableton Forum

A friend has recently upgraded his Macbook pro to Snow Leopard and is saying the speed improvements are amazing and is really advocating I do the same. I can't say I have any issues currently but I'm obviously always tempted by more speed. Would you say it's worth the hassle? Is there any risk I might screw my stable stage laptop up? Does it really make things faster?

Or should I go the whole hog to Lion (now we have support

I'd recommend SL however let me tell you I'm on Lion and everything works fine, I have:
SW:
Reason 5.0
Cubase Artist 6.0.3
Live 8.2.5 M-Audio Edition
Logic Pro 9.0.5
Nexus 2
Etcetera...
HW:
MOTU Ultralite Hybrid MK3
M-Audio Axiom 49

The best idea is to do the research and then make an informed decision. Live 8.2.5 supports Lion, but your third-party plugins and other software might not - check the manufacturers' websites and see what the status is (or contact them if it's not displayed). Better to be absolutely sure than to upgrade and realize some of your favorite tools won't work.

Migra wrote:I'd recommend SL however let me tell you I'm on Lion and everything works fine, I have:
SW:
Reason 5.0
Cubase Artist 6.0.3
Live 8.2.5 M-Audio Edition
Logic Pro 9.0.5
Nexus 2
Etcetera...
HW:
MOTU Ultralite Hybrid MK3
M-Audio Axiom 49

Is there any major reason for us humble snow leopard users to upgrade yet? From a DAW perspective did you find any advantage? 30 euro for a new dashboard seems pretty pricey! I learned from my windows experience - unless theres a good reason to upgrade, wait a while till music software and hardware catches up!

I upgraded to SL hoping to see speed improvements, but frankly I think things are slower. I have a 5 yr old white macbook

Another reason to upgrade to Snow Leopard is it deletes something like 8G of files that are in Leopard.

Personally I have Lion on my non essential Macs but my main music Mac is still running Snow Leopard until probably at least 6 months after the release of Lion. I have too much third party software to think it’s all going to gel flawlessly.

moonpie wrote:Is there any major reason for us humble snow leopard users to upgrade yet? From a DAW perspective did you find any advantage? 30 euro for a new dashboard seems pretty pricey! I learned from my windows experience - unless theres a good reason to upgrade, wait a while till music software and hardware catches up!

I Insist stay with SL or upgrade to SL if you're still on Leopard, honestly I find Lion way faster than SL, I like the new feaures also, in my case I think I was lucky with MOTU drivers and all my software, but as David said, there might be still some 3rd party problems, so you thinking about go Lion do your homework and do some research about all your software and hardware....

Do you need more speed on a stage laptop? If not and it's stable, I'd say leave well alone.....and if you must do it, make a clone of your drive first to revert to when it's all gone to hell

No problems with upgrading to Lion for me either, but I agree with previous posters. I think I got relatively lucky in that all of my essential third party plugins work fine. That may not be the case for everyone. The main improvement for me in Lion is not a new dashboard, it is being able to swipe through as many full screen apps as you want - including apps loaded in parallels. I must say I am loving the trackpad gestures, though I think you need one the newer MBP's or a magic trackpad to get full use out of them.

The loss of Rosetta will be a sticking point for a lot of people, but the only app I relied on that for of importance was the beta editor for my Nord Modular G1. I use the Windows editor through parallel now and when in Coherence mode, it just feels like a native apps and works better than the beta OSX version anyway. Only issue is needing to dedicate midi ports to parallels as you cannot share between the two.

If you use ONLY Ableton I'd say Lion 10.7.1 with Live 8.2.5 is as stable as any versions I've yet run.

If you use Ableton with lots of other plugins and VSTs then THOROUGHLY check the compatibility of those as you might HAVE to go S.L. only.

I'd highly recommend an upgrade of some sort, but do a full backup first! Then no matter what, you can go back to how it is now and you don't have anything to lose. Always a good idea regardless for any working system.

Thanks for all the advice, I think I'm going to play safe for now and stick with Leopard, I'm feeling it's not worth the hassle. I'll probably get a new laptop next year anyhow.

barstu wrote:Thanks for all the advice, I think I'm going to play safe for now and stick with Leopard, I'm feeling it's not worth the hassle. I'll probably get a new laptop next year anyhow.

I would definitely go to Snow Leopard, whatever about Lion! As someone mentioned, it frees up a lot of space and runs better than Leopard in general.

Also, not sure what machine you have, but I believe you at least need a Core2 duo as one of my mates couldn't update his Core duo.

its a 2.5 ghz core duo. Free up more space? Does it use less disk space then?

Another vote for Snow Leopard. Go for it.

I am holding off on Lion for a few more months most likely. Just need to wait for a critical mass of my software to be ready to go. Remember, it is not just your DAW, but also MIDI / Audio Drivers, plug-ins, utilities, etc that need an update most likely.

Cheers,
Brian