Remember the Force, Luke!

Stable.
Reliable.
Predictable.
Available.
Manageable.

I’m going to change all of these attributes of my studio environment. After many years of running Pro Tools on the Windows platform I am caving in and crossing over to the other side. Next week I will receive a dual processor 2.5GHz Apple G5 for the studio as well as another I/O for Pro Tools HD.

This will mean a big change.

I will run the two platforms in parallel while I am bringing up the Apple environment. That way I won’t be committing critical production work to the new platform until I have worked everything out. I may be in for a total surprise. Which is to say that everything just works. I’ve never had that happen before with major technology upgrades like this.

I bought a couple of books on Mac OS X and I have been playing with my daughter’s iBook so I doubt that I will have any major issues from a usability perspective. However, I do know the Windows environment exceptionally well so I will lose out on some of that familiarity.

Why the move to Apple?

In the pro audio community Apple still holds a dominant market position. For example, on the Digidesign User Conference, there are over 130,00 posts on the Pro Tools TDM system for the Mac and only 6,500 posts on the Pro Tools TDM system for Windows. Many of my favourite plugins are only available on the Mac. Most importantly? The G5 just looks like a cool machine.

I’ll let you know how the technology upheaval goes.