Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Journey to the Dark Side 4: Leaping to Leopard

After many frustrating attempts to get my audio mixer (MBox 2 Mini by DigiDesign) to work with the Tiger (Apple OS ZX 10.4), I decided to make the leap to the Leopard Apple OS X 10.5. The install disk came with the computer so there was no extra cost. Boy and I glad I did upgrade!

I must give credit to the Apple Care consultant who told me that this month or next the third party vendors would all be releasing their upgraded drivers for the new system. I had enough of trying to make the DigiDesign software work as advertised with Tiger; after all I had bought the system with Tiger precisely because I would be able to work on my new laptop! Let me add my voice to the growing chorus of infuriated Pro Tools users who have been abused by this software company for years. A pox on them and the horse they rode in on; we are stuck with expensive hardware that will only work with the advertised systems for extra dollars, e.g. they finally came out with drivers for Vista but demanded $50 more for the upgrade!

The install to Leopard was pretty uneventful except for that heart stopping moment when during my first attempt to install, it told me that I couldn’t upgrade because I didn’t have OS X 10.4 installed! I just rebooted and tried again, successfully. See, this is a computer problem, not just a PC problem. After about a half hour of cooking, the system was ready to go and some of the results were really pleasing. For instance, I was able to find and connect successfully to my old HP printer that was networked to my home system’s PC running Win XP. Even though I got a brand new Epson multi-function printer for $5 after rebates, I still have over $100 in HP ink to burn off and I won’t just throw that away.

More about my Leopard experience and a new phone is on the way!

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