Macintosh Operating System
The Mac OS 8.0 and 9.0 versions work quite well in music audio projects and there is a wealth of third party applications. The upgrade to OS X (if you do not purchase a new Mac on which it is already installed) requires backing up your hard drive, unistalling whatever version of Mac OS you are running and installing OS X. OS 9.04 can also be upgraded to OS 9.1, then OS 9.1 can be upgraded to OS X. It is also recommended by Apple that one partitions the drive into a OS 9.X partition and an OS X partition. OS X files may be saved in the OS 9.X partition if one experiences some problems with OS X. (Unfortunately, to partition a drive the contents of the drive must first be erased). Mac OS X can be installed on the Power Mac G4, Power Mac G3, any PowerBook G3 produced after May 1998, the iMac and the iBook. Apple presently recommends that you partition your internal drive and install OS X in a partition and reinstall your version of Mac OS.
The new MAC OS X is based on the previous NeXt operating system and UNIX (Darwin, a Free-BSD version) as is its kernel (core coding). The further updated version is MAC OS 10.3 (Panther). The OS X also supports a application development standard named Cocoa (based on the earlier NeXTStep) that allows programmers to write applications for OS X at a more rapid pace then previous MAC OS versions.
Apple introduced an improved audio driver for multi-channel audio support with OS X known as Core Audio and many audio applications have been revised to take advantage of this low-latency interface. Apple also introduced an improved audio plug-in application support format known as Audio Units.
The user interface is known as Aqua. The graphics presentation and font support is based on the Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf) thus viewing your work on the screen is really very good. Streaming Audio support comes from Quicktime 5 (which is included as part of the OS). OS X also has driver support many well known peeripherals and is very good with recognizing devices connected by the external FireWire interface by merely connecting to your computer.
Some changes in the Mac OS X interface is that “Finder” is now known as “Desktop Application,” and “Get Info” is now known as “Inspector.” Each Finder/Desktop window now has a tool bar. The graphics display of OS X is based on the graphic look of the Adobe Acrobat application. The OS X package ships with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.1 as the default web browser.
- The upgrade of OS X to OS 10.1 (Puma) includes: Improved launch time for applications.
- Improved position movement of the Dock bar.
- Systems Preferences now has 4 category headings: Personal, Hardware, Internet & Network, System.
- Multimedia: improved CD burning and DVD support, increased list of supported digital cameras.
As applications are upgraded to be compatible with OS X, and drivers are made available for peripherals, one may boot the system to OS X Classic environment (which requires tha OS 9.1 had been installed) and older applications may then be used without problem.
In MAC OS X and 10.1, when an application freezes one does not first need to shut down the computer and then restart the computer. Rather, other applications and the operating system itself will continue to function. One must select Force Quit from the Menu to quit the application. However, you may lose part of the audio projection depending on whether the suspect application saved any of it.
One can specify what language the Mac OS X screen interface displays:
- Click the Applications Folder in Finder
- Click the Systems Preferences Folder
- Click Show All to see all possible system icons
- Click the International icon
- Select a Language preference and Script preference
When considering software applications for the Apple G4 PowerMac look to see that they have been written to be compatible with the Motorola AltiVec chip architecture (referred to by Apple as the “Velocity Engine.” The Motorola chip breaks down information into 16-bit to 32-bit packets for faster processing. Software that are compatible with this processor will perform noticeably faster.
The last (August 2002) upgrade of Mac OS X was 10.2 (Jaguar). The upgrade is substantial from 10.0 (X). The upgrade actually returns some commands from OS 9 that were not included in OS X. OS 10.2 also includes support that makes an Apple computer (almost) able to interact with an MS Windows-based computer on the same network. If for some reason you ever have to reinstall OS 10.x, there is now a clean install support which means one does not need to erase the entire contents of the hard drive. An additional feature of the operating system known as Rendezvous allows two or more similarly Rendezvous equipped computers to recognize each other immediately on a network (either cable connected or wireless) without the user having to actively search and connect to another computer (Rendezvous will function across the Apple and MS Windows platforms). OS 10.2 provides very good support for the AAC audio codec, 3D high resolution audio playback and for Quicktime 6.0.
The upgraded version OS 10.3 (Panther) will begin shipping toward the end of 2003. Finder (Applications) is updated for better access, Expose has reduced versions of all open applications so that windows do not have to minimized to locate a desired application, there is now the ability to send and receive faxes via modem within any application that has a Print command, and an improved script editor for AppleScript.