Sound Forge "Finally On The Mac"?

robwood wrote on 8/26/2012, 12:13 PM

Tming is good for Sony with this, since Apple doesn't have a good 2-track editor.

Too bad Sony couldn't have stepped up to bat this time last year and presented a better Vegas while Apple was busy EOL'ing FCP, FCS, Color, etc.

[r]Evolution wrote on 8/26/2012, 4:32 PM

...since Apple doesn't have a good 2-track editor.
Nevermind: Audacity, DSP-Quattro, Wave Editor, Sound Studio, Amadeus Pro, WaveLab, Soundblade

deusx wrote on 8/26/2012, 9:54 PM

Those market gains are not really all that relevant because when your market share is next to nothing there is nowhere to go but up. It's not really going to continue. Sooner or later it will stagnate and go the other way.

And your numbers are wrong. OSX shares are still below 7% ( worldwide and not making up numbers by adding certain devices as they usually do ). Still as insignificant as ever ( windows is at 92% ).

Add to that the fact that mac pros use 2-3 year old intel xeon cpus it's obvious that Apple doesn't even try to pretend to be a pro hardware manufacturer any more.

Checking a couple of web sites I have access to, out of roughly 40 000 daily visitors less than 2% use OSX.

>>>Nevermind: Audacity, DSP-Quattro, Wave Editor, Sound Studio, Amadeus Pro, WaveLab, Soundblade<<<

How many of those are really good? Wavelab maybe? Most of those others are considered good enough for what most people do, not pro exactly.

robwood wrote on 8/26/2012, 10:47 PM

some people like koolaid... i gotta be in the mood.

anyway, Wavelab was/is good; used it in the 90's as a partner to Cubase. liked it more than Sound Forge actually... moved to Vegas/Sound Forge around the time Wavelab went multitrack iirc.

but with Bias gone, someone's gonna fill that space... like I said earlier, it'd be good if Sony could do it this time, given the lack of effort last year when Apple eol'ed most of their NLE line-up.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/27/2012, 7:48 AM

> "I don't mind Macs in general, but they're severely overpriced for what they are, and personally I wouldn't buy one unless that changed."

I use to think that until I was looking for a workstation last year and I priced out a 12 core HP, Boxx, and Mac Pro. The HP and Boxx came in at $6,000 and the Mac Pro was $5,000. A full $1,000 cheaper with the same processor, same memory, everything. My wife's previous laptop was a Lenovo that I paid $1,400 for. She now was a MacBook Pro that I paid $1,200 for and it's every bit as good or better. If you compare a "quality" PC with a Mac they are the same price. Apple just doesn't have a "budget-priced" line.

Having said that, I also bought a Mac Mini for $599 and it's every bit as good as any other $599 PC. So I just don't get the statement that Apple's are more expensive. Yea, they don't make a $499 laptop like Acer but I wouldn't buy a $499 Acer laptop because they are made like junk.

~jr

robwood wrote on 8/27/2012, 9:02 AM

"A full $1,000 cheaper with the same processor, same memory, everything." -JohnnyRoy

Yeh, they're expensive. And for offline editing alone, they're more than is needed imo.
But when realtime or compositing or cgi enters, they start to look pretty good:
As Mac Pro stagnates, PC workstations muscle ahead

more on the MacBook Pro
apple-incrementally-updates-mac-pro-desktop-for-2012
apple-admits-new-mac-pro-isnt-all-that-new
1) i don't think Apple has much interest in working with professionals; too demanding, and there's industry standards (most of which Apple devolved to 3rd party vendors)
2) i think it's more likely HP will be providing computers in 5-10 years than Apple

that said, i'm looking at a (probably second-hand) MacBook with firewire; something with a small footprint for recording 6-10 tracks via my RME... prefer dedicating computers to specific tasks; tried the one-size-fits-all; never works out for me.

ymmv :)

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/27/2012, 10:41 AM

> "As Mac Pro stagnates, PC workstations muscle ahead"

yea, I couldn't wait any longer and wasn't going to buy a Mac Pro with 2 year old technology so once again I build a new Windows 7 workstation this time around the Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz processor and an ASUS P9X79 Pro motherboard. I'm really happy with it and it should hold me over long enough to see if Apple is serious about expanding the Mac Pro line or not.

~jr

Editguy43 wrote on 8/27/2012, 12:27 PM

John, does that motherboard have firewire onboard? I was looking at that or the X79 Sabertooth.

Paul B

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/27/2012, 4:30 PM

> "John, does that motherboard have firewire onboard?"

No, unfortunately. I had to buy a separate Firewire card to add in but now I can't feed my front Firewire port on my case. :( The ASUS P9X79 WS has Firewire but I didn't realize it before I bought my board or I might had bought that one. Intel X79 boards have Firewire also.

~jr

deusx wrote on 8/28/2012, 1:35 AM

Again, not quite correct. It's the other way around. a windows machine will cost almost $1000 less with roughly or exactly the same hardware.

You don't have to buy HP or Boxx, that is the point. You have choices. With Apple you don't.

New mac book pro with 2.6 ghz cpu costs between $2200 - $2800 depending on whether you choose that cheap IPS panel they call retina ( they really should be ashamed of using such cheap parts and charging that much for it ).

You can get better hardware and a better display for about $1700 from Sager. And you can't ugrade anything on these mac book pros while you can upgrade almost everything on Clevo/Sager machines.

robwood wrote on 8/28/2012, 12:59 PM

"Again, not quite correct. It's the other way around. a windows machine will cost almost $1000 less with roughly or exactly the same hardware." -deusx

actually...

"workstation retailers like HP, Dell, and BOXX consistently come in at a higher price than the equivalently specced Mac Pro." -Ars Technica
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/08/as-mac-pro-stagnates-pc-workstations-muscle-ahead/

JJKizak wrote on 8/28/2012, 1:04 PM

That's all we need now is "I approve this message".
JJK

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/28/2012, 5:10 PM

> "Again, not quite correct. It's the other way around. a windows machine will cost almost $1000 less with roughly or exactly the same hardware."

I priced it myself. I know what I saw. There as no error. The Mac Pro was $1,000 less with identical hardware. The article "As Mac Pro stagnates, PC workstations muscle ahead" that robwood posted also confirms this.

> "You don't have to buy HP or Boxx, that is the point. You have choices. With Apple you don't."

You missed the point. The hardware was identical and that was the point. yes I could buy a QuadCore PC for $499 but I wouldn't compare it to a $2,400 quad core PC... and that's the point. I have a choice between HP or Boxx or Apple and Apple was cheaper for the same system.

> "New mac book pro with 2.6 ghz cpu costs between $2200 - $2800 depending on whether you choose that cheap IPS panel they call retina ( they really should be ashamed of using such cheap parts and charging that much for it )."

The new MacBook Pro without the Retina display starts at $1,199 for the 13 inch and $1,799 for the 15 inch. I don't know where you are getting your numbers from.

> "You can get better hardware and a better display for about $1700 from Sager. And you can't ugrade anything on these mac book pros while you can upgrade almost everything on Clevo/Sager machines."

Yea, but then I can't run OS X which I use every day and prefer over Windows.

~jr

deusx wrote on 8/29/2012, 4:56 AM

Do I have to repeat it again? Who cares about HP or Boxx. You don't have to buy from them, in the PC world you have choices. You can get the exact same thing elsewhere or assemble it yourself for 1/2 the price.

Look at Apple's site. it's about $2700 for a 15" mac book pro with retina display and 2.6 ghz CPU.

The starting point of $1800 you quote and specs you get for that, I wouldn't take it if they were giving it out for free. It would just be taking up space. It has a garbage low res display, only 4 gb of memory, slow 5400 rpm drive and the slowest cpu/gpu. Sager with those specs doesn't cost even a $1000, so again it's almost a $1000 less for same hardware.

If you enjoy OSX more and are willing to pay through the nose to use it, fine. I have no problem with that, that's your thing. But let's not claim that macs are cheaper. They may be cheaper than certain PC manufacturers, but you can get the EXACT same thing for far less elsewhere.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 8/29/2012, 7:06 AM

> "Look at Apple's site. it's about $2700 for a 15" mac book pro with retina display and 2.6 ghz CPU."

But you are comparing "Apples" to "Oranges" (no pun intended). The Sager doesn't have a Retina display so you can't compare to that. The other thing that is driving up the price of the Retina Mac is the large SSD drive. Does the Sager have that? Also, does the Sager get 8 hrs of battery life because the other thing driving the price of the Retina Mac is having enough battery to support that display. The non-Retina display Mac Book Pro is $1,799 and you said the Sager is $1,700. That's the same price to me. Both are expandable (I know the retina ones are not but that's because they are more like the Air's being so thin).

> " But let's not claim that macs are cheaper. They may be cheaper than certain PC manufacturers, but you can get the EXACT same thing for far less elsewhere."

I'm just saying that they are comparable for the same quality parts. You probably already know that you can't compare laptops based on Mhz alone. A 2.6Ghz T9000 series CPU is not the same as a 2.6Ghz T8000 series or 2.6Ghz T7000 series, or 2.6Ghz T6000 series, or even the P9000, P8000, P7000 series so you really have to know what the part numbers are inside to do a fair comparison on paper. That's why I gave the analogy that I can buy a $499 QuadCore or a $2,400 QuadCore I would not say that the $2,400 is a rip-off... it's just using higher quality parts. But I'm not comparing on paper...

I personally own two identical laptops build with the exact same Intel processor, memory, etc. One is a MacBook Pro and the other is a Levono W500. When I upgraded from the Lenovo to the MacBook Pro (and yes... I considered it an upgrade even though it has the exact same specs) I even took the 8GB of memory from the Lenovo W500 and put it in my MacBook Pro and I got a huge boost in performance moving from Windows to OS X. On the W500 I could barely run one VMware virtual machine and the whole thing would bog down. On my MacBook Pro I can run multiple virtual machines one of them being ESXi hypervisor that is running it's own virtual machines, and the Mac doesn't break a sweat. I'm just reporting what I'm seeing. The Windows laptop was a slow lumbering giant that I couldn't even switch windows without massive swapping (or whatever it as doing but it wasn't making me productive).

So I'm not talking about something I read on the Internet or speculating about what a Mac is like without owning one. I own several Windows PC's and several OS X Mac's and the Mac's seem to perform better than similar PC's largely because OS X seems to handle my workloads much better than Windows does. I can only speak from my own experiences.

I appreciate your point of view, and enjoy a lively debate ;-) but I use my MacBook Pro every day at my job and I wouldn't go back to using that Lenovo W500 if you paid me. It's just too slow compared to my Mac. Also, my MacBook Pro lasts about 5 hrs on one battery charge. My co-workers who have Windows laptops are running back to their office for their chargers after only 2 hrs of meetings. So there are a lot reason's a prefer the Mac and why a lot of people at my work are switching.

This is why I'd love to see Vegas Pro on a Mac.

~jr