After a long, impatient week, the new iMac arrived this morning. I promised myself that I would get everything else set up on it before seeing how my DAW would run, but by 8pm I still had not finished installing and setting up everything I needed for an actual productive life (for example, EndNote and Quicken are still in the queue). I felt my eyes crossing at all the details yet to be handled and concluded I needed to do something nice for myself, so I decided to give the DAW a whirl.
Contrary to my earlier fears, I had run across some discussions online that indicated that Tracktion 3 should run fine on multi-core Intel processors, CPUs that were not what it was originally built for. So I began to entertain some hope -- even some excitement -- that I might not lose all the work I'd put into this new endeavor that was enabled specifically by the ridiculously marked-down copies of Tracktion 3 made available following its discontinuance. Replacing it with something equivalent would run several hundred dollars.
The good news is that -- after some initial crashes and accompanying panic -- an updated version of Tracktion seems to be stable on the Mac quad-core: yay! The bad news is that one of my principal softsynth plug-ins, ZynAddSubFX, is currently only available for Windows and Linux (boo!). There apparently was a MacOS port some years ago, but the link is dead (apparently long since). As a consequence, I will need to rebuild in a new softsynth the voices now missing from my arrangements, something I am as yet unskilled in. But, it will be a good learning experience!
Of course, after a week without a computer, I am terribly behind in my academic work: dissertation (of course), class paper (last one ever!), a couple of presentations (not the least of which is for my daughter's school), and a menagerie of minutia. So, my seemingly Sisyphean music project is going to roll further back down the hill, but at least it looks like it won't disappear.
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