Bloatware

[Saintmatthew]

So is anyone else getting tired of the exponential growth of resource hogging code being put out these days. Mac OS X is more and more beginning to emulate Microsoft's style of "pile it on" programming, growing bigger and bigger and running slower and slower. The most noticable step being the 10.3.8 update that tripled the startup time of my G5, even after permission repair, defrag and the usual upkeep. I'll be the first to laud the sleek classy feel of OS X's interface and how exciting it was to upgrade an operating system for the first time in god know's how many years. However, compare it to OS 9, ugly in comparison or not, and it's readily apparent the resources being sacrificed on the altar of GUI. Sure, this is great for average consumers but Mac being a traditonally preferred platform for pro audio it can be downright painful sometimes thinking about how the raw power in front of you and how much is being wasted.

My point for comparison is the last system I actually used to record an album. Currently, I'm using DP 4.5 with an Maudio firewire interface on a 1.6ghz G5 with a gig of RAM, 80 GB SATA internal hard disk and I perform the maintenance procedures in the "fat cats" article on a regular basis. I get about 32 tracks of audio and can run some baseline realtime effects for mixing, compression, eq, reverb, etc. Plus run MIDI sequencing to the polyphony restrictions of my instruments. I'd like to mention though, that even only running a few tracks of audio, you'll notice the the clocking on the display running choppy as hell, which makes precision operations near impossible.

The system mentioned earlier that is my basis for comparison was a Pentium 166 with 64 meg of RAM and a 6 gig internal IDE drive and a 5 gig SCSI 2 drive, a creative soudblaster AWE 32 running cakewalk 7. From this system I averaged about 24 tracks of audio with the same basic real time effects. The fact the todays systems can't manage a whole lot more is mind boggling at times. Sure it looks better, and there tend to be more features. Half the time the new features really don't work so swell, and there's some things Cakewalk did that newer systems can't. Some features granted are absolutely awesome but the baseline functionality seems a terrible thing to sacrifice.

This has been my obsessive train of thought lately and I'm curious for others' points of view, trains of thought etc on this. I'll have a similar post relating to hardware vs VI coming soon too.....

[Weekendshooter]

Yes, s/w growth has been a problem I recall since the days of loading flight programs in our massive 7k memory cores!

I've noticed myself setting up the various computers we buy recently as "general", "family", and "everything uninstalled/turned off not related to audio".

[sdfalk]

I'm runnning 10.3.9 which starts up faster
and runs faster then my initial 10.2.8 install.