10 February 2007
Sorted
At last, and after much tribulation, my new computer is pretty much set up. There've been many diversions and problems along the way - getting hold of Windows, trying to back things up, trying to sort out Parallels - but at last it seems I'm just about there. Pro Tools is working, Boot Camp is working, Windows is working. Parallels is working. OpenOffice is working. In short, pretty much everything is working - except Finale which doesn't want to play back without glitching in any variant of Windows I am running here. Which is a trifle annoying because I wanted to play about with Garritan Personal Orchestra, which comes with Finale, but which isn't supported for Mac in this version. But at least it works Macside, so it may end up being easiest to just ditch it for Windows and wait till I upgrade again to get GPO.
But I'm loving the Mac. And I'm loving the Mac OS. And Parallels is just amazing - being able to run Windows and have it integrated into the Mac OS is just incredible. And the Windows programmes I'm using within it all appear in the Mac Dock
So I hereby shamelessly declare myself a convert. From being a DOS girl, then a Windows girl, then a Microsoft-hating Windows girl, I am now a Mac girl, albeit one who revels in OS X's Unix roots and has made all the possible tweaks to get it to behave a bit more like Windows (right-clicks, scroll bar arrows top & bottom to start with).
I'm absolutely loving my freedom too. I started out really well and finished two pieces in January - the two-part inventions are all done now and just need laying out, and I wrote a song to a short poem by Walt Whitman which I think will be the first of a small group - perhaps about four. I haven't been doing quite so well in February, mostly because of hassles with finding and then sorting out the computer, but I spent a little time this afternoon hunting down other WW fragments to go with the first song, so hopefully everything will be back on track shortly.
Labels: composition, computers, finale, os x
