Hey,
I need some feedback concering the whole Mac user experience. I'm so sick and tired of Windows totally fucking me when I need to do something.

Here's what I need to know:
1. How is the usability w/Mac OS X?
2. Stabability, is it really that good?
3. Can you tell me the good and the bad?
4. What your overall experience is? Whether it be with use, support or upgrading.

Here's a list of things I'm always doing w/my pc:
1. Playing games
2. Sending emails
3. Downloading Music
4. Using my Ipod
5. Transfering music
6. Uploading large files
7. Recording mixes
8. Music production
9. Burning CD's
10. Working w/images
11. Surfing the net
12. Chatting

The biggest problem I have w/my Windows machine now is that when I'm in the mix and recording, I always get a blue screen w/a win32k.sys error. I've gotten other blue screens too w/Page_Fault errors and IRQ_NOT_OR_LESS_EQUAL_TO_0 errors.

(Maybe it's the software I'm using?) (I'd still like to know the Mac experience though)

I've been a Windows user since the first 486 processor so I'm really thinking it's time to try something new.

well, the only reason you should be having a system file error like that anymore, is because one of two main reasons.

If you are using something other/older than either Windows 2000, NT or XP, then upgrade and you should fix it.

Or if you are using crappy freeware or shareware software that you haven't spent any money on.

Tell us what your setup is and maybe we can offer more comments. Be sure to include what your PC config is including your soundcard as well as what softare and OS you are running. We obviously can't help you if you don't tell us exactly what you problems is.

___________________
When you dance, the DJ takes you on a journey, but he or she is usually not the focus of your experience at a club or festival or wherever you hear the music. Dancing is. Music is.

Hey,
Here's what I'm using:
Athlon 2800XP
1Gig PC-2700 DDR 2 Memory
GeForce4 4200ti
120GB WD HD
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Platinum
Win XP Pro w/service pack 1

I think my problem might be the result of using cracked software. Just did a clean install of the OS so I'll see how the system runs.

Please don't complain about system errors when you are using pirated software. If you can afford to buy a system like that, then buy your fuckin software too.

___________________
When you dance, the DJ takes you on a journey, but he or she is usually not the focus of your experience at a club or festival or wherever you hear the music. Dancing is. Music is.

1. How is the usability w/Mac OS X? Mac has an excelent OS, but if you are a windows junky, IOW a long term user it will be hell for you, switching to OS from windows is not easy, and not wise, unless you are a rare breed you will hate it.
2. Stabability, is it really that good? There strong point, they are very stable units but upgrades are VERY costly and often you just have to buy a new unit.
3. Can you tell me the good and the bad? Good, the systems are very stable, cooling technology on them is great, and they clock pretty well. Bad you have jack shit software selection if you are coming from windows, mac has far less to offer since many things are made on a win 32 engine (windows engine). The OS is stable but the product selection is very limited, recently more and more companies are working to make macs more equal but going from windows to mac, you can kiss a lot of familiar progs good bye, there are emulators and windows to mac runs fairly smooth some times, but not all the time so if you are heavy into your PC use, i would stay PC.
4. What your overall experience is? Whether it be with use, support or upgrading.
PC for upgrading plain and simple, you will go through hell and high water upgrading a Mac, support for PC is shite, i have never dealt with mac customer service, it is a smaller bunch of users and a better company so it may be better but bottom line is tech support is tech support haha. And if you are used to windows going to OS X will be very different and a headache for you because you have billions of habbits you do not realise that will smack you in the face when you switch, IE a single button mouse, all you will be doing is right clicking and shouting WTF as you smack your box around.

1. Playing games - Uh kiss that good bye, Mac presently has little to nothing to choose from, all games are on Win 32 platform first since that is the main market, NVidia has signed deals agreeing to work with Mac to get more of a Unix based gaming market around but i am yet to see it emerge in full force, PC is for gaming right now that is that.
2. Sending emails - It has a keyboard and a modem/ethernet card this will not be any different on either one.
3. Downloading Music - Mac is the same as PC for Downloading Music, still can play em and so on, but if you are using free ware progs many are likely not to run on Mac.
4. Using my Ipod - Mac makes Ipod, so yeah
5. Transfering music - As in peer to peer or moving around? This is a basic opperation so if you mean around on the comp or burning then that is same on either, from internet it is your conection speed.
6. Uploading large files - Internet conection determines this, not really PC related, yes more ram, bigger processor can speed it along but that is not really brand related so much as budget related
7. Recording mixes - Sounds software related to me, both use same sound input output devices, a radio shack adapter that costs about 10 bux and you will have input to drop your mixes in, but software conflicts can again be an issue if switching OS's
8. Music production - Check you software for unix based compatibility it may or may not work. But this is one of things that i think is good on either Unix/win 32 based OS'
9. Burning CD's - These days any System will be relatively easy to do this, it is now an integrated feature in the average OS
10. Working w/images - Photoshop works for both mac and PC so you get that you are set
11. Surfing the net - Porn will be accessable on either PC or Mac (haha jk) but net surfing is again a basic operation can be done on either OS, both have browsers, IE is a piece of shit but every site is based off of it's coding which MS leaves unstandard on purpose to monopolize the market, unfortunately this monopoly means it is likely youll need to use it seeing as many streaming programs dont even work outside of IE.
12. Chatting - Well, chatting is available anywhere, i chat through programs as many people do, so you would have to see if those programs are only win 32 based or if they have a unix based version as well,

All in all, if you are using PC stay PC Mac are nice, but costly and if you are an avid PC user a Mac will seem like a chunk of shit to you ahha, switching isnt as easy as the mac comercials made it look.

Not to mention if you wanted to upgrade down the road Mac's are very difficult to upgrade so you will be forced to buy a new unit Sooner than if you bought a PC.

So, for cost and software compatibility thanks to the MS monopoly PC is probably the wiser choice to go.



This is just my opinion though, but it is from being cast between mac and Pc users for many years now hah. Mac users hate windows, windows users hate macs, that is that haha. So hope this helps but there is likely more than just my answers to your questions i am a PC user, who was contemplating switching to mac a few years ago and was told it was probably wiser to stay PC i am glad i did now.

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Peace DigDug

I think you also forgot to mention macs cost a shit load more than PC's sooo plan on spending more money unless you solely use you comp for work/music production/movie editing/graphics mac prolly isnt a choice for you as it lack most games that are availible for pc....Mac os x owns windows any day and is easy to get started with.........

___________________
"The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes"

Maybe I can afford a system like that because I don't have to pay for any software. I didn't really think about the software and what kind of problems it could of been causing me until after I made my post.
Thanks for all the feedback. I think my pirated software days are done

yea, unless you're going to be doing some serious audio/video stuff... and i mean serious like professional quality stuff
i'd stick with a PC if i were you

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The original poster may have already had his questions answered but since every poster thus far has been a PC user I thought it would be a good idea to have the opinion of a mac user as well.

First of all, I am a relatively new mac user. I got my first mac back in November so I won't be able to answer all of the questions. Before then I excluseively used PCs so I am a switcher. I have a very elementary knowledge of music production especially which I know was the main topic of this thread.

Here we go, music production. I have just started in DJing so I am using a relatively basic program to practice my mixing (I plan on getting turntables when I get the money but that's another story). On the mac I use megaseg. Since my mac is an ibook (a laptop for those who are not mac savvy) I don't have room for an external soundcard. To combat this I am using an imic which is a USB input device which allows me to have my second sound output for queing songs. With the iMic I haven't had any problems with it and megaseg.

Now onto megaseg itself, it's you most basic mixing software. It doesn't have any automatic BPM counters so you have to tap to get an approximate BPM and then use your ears to beatmatch which is the way beat mixing should be done anyways =). So you've got your two sound outputs and a crossfader with a couple of preset crossfades (I never use them though, you're better off crossfading manually). Megaseg also has a single que point that you can set and return to with teh keyboard which makes it easy to start right on the beat. There are no other sound effectes that I'm aware of so you are going to have to send the output through some external effects if you want to use any. The one other thing about megaseg is that you can also change the mode so that you send both sound outputs to an external crossfader if you choose to. These are just the basic things that I use or think would be beneficial to DJs but I'm sure there are other features that I have left out. I'm also sure that there are programs for the mac that can do a lot more than megaseg but for a beginning DJ like myself, I don't need all of the bells and whistles so megaseg is a great program for me at this point.

Now I'll take a minute to discuss a couple of the PC programs I have used in the past. MixMeister pro 4. For making mixes for production this did everything I needed it to do. I was just using it to make cds for the car and friends so again, I may not have used all of the features. This program does all the work for you, you don't have to adjust the speeds at all. It has an automaticl BPM counter so all you have to do is line up the beats and MixMeister will do the rest. Next, PCDJ Red. This program has all the bells and whistles. It has something like 10 or 20 que points if you need them (I don't know if anyone does) auto BPM counter blah blah blah. It'll do everything for you as well if you want it to. My friend also has a program called tracktor. This is also a great program, it has even more features than PCDJ Red but I found the auto mixing was much worse than PCDJ and MM becuase it would try to count the beats at every point in the song so when it got to a quiet part it just thought that the song had a very low beat count and would try to compensate for it. This is obviouslly extremely bad when trying to beatmix.

Onto all the other stuff. I have had no problems adjusting to the mac environment. Whenever I go back to windows I can't stand how it operates. First, on OSX there is no registry so you can just delete files rather than having to uninstall them. Their version of the start menu I find is a lot better because all of the programs in the menu are accessible by hovering over the bar. If you put only the programs you use regularly this works great. You can also put any folders you use regularly in the dock (apple's name for the start menu) as well. One other thing I like is that on OSX, all of the programs go into the applications folder and all of your media goes into the home folder so organization is much better. All of the musci goes into the itunes folder, movies in movies, documents in documents, etc. Another thing I like is all of the external devices I have plugged into my ibook (cameras, ipod, etc.) automatically work when I plug them in. I haven't had to install any additional software. Mind you, the paripherals have to be mac compatible which can be a pain somethimes from the eyes of a PC user =).

Now the iPod, when I first plugged my iPod into my computer, my music player (iTunes) automatically opened up and asked me if I wanted to transfer all of my files to my iPod. At the time I had about 15.5 GB and with the firewire it took maybe 10-15 minutes to do it. The firewire came with the iPod and yes my laptop came with a firewire port even though it's one of the lower models. I still haven't found PC laptops with firewire ports on them for a reasonable price.

E-mailing, no problems at all.

Chating, you can use iChat but I use fire so that I can talk to my PC friends on MSN as well as my mac friends on iChat.

Games, on this one you're out of luck. I will admit the mac doesn't have as many games as the PC so if you're buying a computer for gaming, go with a PC hands down. The market is much smaller in the mac world so there are less developers, which brings up another good point, if you're using a mac you should try to purchase as many of the programs as you can because the market is small enough already.

Office, complete compatibility. All word, excel, powerpoint files go back and forth flawlessly. Apple is working on a suite of their own right now but I haven't used it so I cannot comment on it at this time.

Downloading/uploading, no problem but it depends on you internet connection like all computers. I also have a wireless internet card which works great.

Internet, most of the internet is no problem but you will run into sites where you don't have the right plugins. I know the official Tiesto site I can't play the background music becuase I don't have the plugin for example.

DivX, this is another area where apple needs to improve. I have had problems with some files but overall it works pretty well.

Price, macs are more expensive but are coming down.

I hope this helps. I tried to answer as much as I could. If there are any mac users out there who can answer the rest or if I have made any mistakes/left anything out then please help me out.

If anyone has any questions feel free to PM me.

Sorry for the long post, I just tried to answer as much as I could to the best of my ability.

Another thing you may want to check out before you make any decisions is the brand new G5s.

www.apple.com

They are now the new benchmark.

quote:

Originally posted by DJDigDug Not to mention if you wanted to upgrade down the road Mac's are very difficult to upgrade so you will be forced to buy a new unit Sooner than if you bought a PC.

that's totally wrong !!! Used to be more the case in the past cause there was some things like proprietary memory etc on macs but now it's same parts as pc.

Macs on the upside in comparasion to a pc tend too age much better... you can buy software for a mac that's 5 years old and still actually work on it not like it was a crawling super slow computer. PCs on the other hand require ongoing upgrades if you wish to be able to run new applications smoothly.

But the major issue should be cost. All the apps are available on mac as much as on pc...

In response to your computer issues, you should keep in mind that a computer that gets serious amounts of usage, according to professional music recording standards anyhow, should be reinstalled from scratch every six months. Takes a couple hours some extra organization but if you've planned it out it's totally worth it.

In conclusion if you have the money go for a mac. You won't regret it.

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