MOTUnation.com

I was a the end of this long post when the webpage just decided to refresh, and I hhad to start over. Fun!

Basically I’m concerned about upgrading from Mavericks 10.9.5 to El Cap 10.11.4.

I’ve read reports that it’s slower that 10.9.5. I’ve heard it’s less stable. I’ve heard rumbling that Apple is less concerned with OS X than iOS these days. And just a minor gripe, I still think that starting with Yosemite, Apple took the best looking OS on the market and ruined it with over saturated colors icons, a flat and unimaginative Dock (yeah, it works with iOS, but they’re not the same).

So let me get to my point.

1) I have two 5,1 MacPros each with 12-cores at 3.46MGz, a Squid 4xSM951 16x PCIe card that holds (4) SM951s in a RAID 0 that has completely taken care of any and all voices droppings outs (at 5700MB/s reads!), and currently 48GBs RAM each The weak link (may up one MP to 96GBs). Main apps are DP and Vienna Ensemble Pro, with Kontkt, Vienna Ensemble Pro, and a million paid for plugins.

2) I now have an an 12.9"A9 iPad Pro! I wasn’t expecting it to be so powerful.The A9 is superb. I run manly synths on it (not only all the top CPU hogs but the best sounding apps top). I actually prefer Notion on iOS to Notion on OSX.

I have several ways to transfer files from iOS to OX. iCloud, which although acceptable can be cumbersome. Dropbox the same. AND my new and FAVORITE OF GENIUS ideas is Apple finally deciding to work on improving on CoreAudio and AudioUnits in both OSX and iOS and more importantly in between OSX and iOS! YES, this is a major deal! INNER APP AUDIO. After spending two months with an iPad Pro, it close to being my daily driver.

If you made it up to here, thanks for sticking with me because here is the payoff. I haven’t had faith in OS X since Jobs passed. Sad. In El Cap, they’ve done some really cool things with CoreAudio, yes I mean Inner Device Audio, Audio Units and Inner App audio for iOS, THE GREATEST of ALL ideas lately - the ability to connect an iPhone or iPad directly to a Mac via a Lightening to USB cable for DIGITALLY TRANSFERRING audio to your OSX from your iOS device. I’m still reading Apple’s developers websites to see if clock info can be sent and read from one divide to other. That would be the killer feature. I just bought a MOTU MicroCook Iic and I don't know if i need it, so I don't but having more than one inyeuu

Can you imagine composing in Notion iOS (for film notation, or using Garageband or Cubasis and putting down some good ideas, some which might end up in finished form on the iPad Pro and all you have to do is transfer those tracks to OSX with a Lightning to USB digital cable and recording a good deal of possibly finished ideas (copying MIDI files would work too but if you’ve mixed some ideas already that can be a creative boon. But by all accounts, El Cap is WORSE than Mavericks and I’m not keen of making a mess of my MacPros.

Mavericks has been STABLE FOR ME FOR YEARS, but it doesn’t have these new CoreAudio features built in to it as El Cap does. I find El Cap butt ugly, but I could live with that if it didn’t PERFORMANCE WORSE that Mavericks according to many sources.

DP/VEP users with a ton of plugins, what is your opinion of El Cap 10.11.4 vs Mavericks 10.9.5?

I’d really love to hear some feedback please. Thanks for reading my story. I’m dying to have a PRO iOS/OSX rig! I'd like to serious discussion please.

I'm learning with the least four Mac OS releases that you win some and you lose some. I've seen some very careless bugs appear in iCal and Mail, and Apple will probably never fix them, instead forcing me to update to another half-baked OS that may fix those bugs while introducing others.

10.9.5 was stable for me. Though Yosemite has been touted as a huge improvement, since I updated a couple months ago, DP 8.07 is crashing pretty often-- sans crash reports. I'm just in the habit of saving as in darker times of yore.

So there isn't a black & white answer. The best thing you can do is create an internal or external partition and install El Cap on one of them and see how it works with ALL the apps and utilities you need it for.

As for getting audio to & from your iOS device, there are very good options without needing El Cap. Secret Base Design has their MUSIC i/o apps, for example. You install something on your mac and something on your iOS device and you can run audio & MIDI between them.

stubbsonic wrote:So there isn't a black & white answer. The best thing you can do is create an internal or external partition and install El Cap on one of them and see how it works with ALL the apps and utilities you need it for.

That's right. Mavericks was not so great for me. Yosemite is solid. A few days back, it said it had been up for 105 days. El Cap turned my MBP into a doorstop. So, all you can do is try out these things and see what happens. Others' experience doesn't tell you much.

I'm off the (so-called) upgrade bandwagon. I have various Macs on various OS X versions (5, 6, 8, 10), all stable, and they will all stay on those versions as long as possible.

Then don't update. Stay with what works.

I disagree on nearly every point but my needs are different than yours. I consider Maverics the worst OS since Lion and was glad to see that Yosemite fixed its most glaring issues.

El Cap probably shouldn't have been released till 10.11.2—or at least till the USB issues were worked out but that was so last year... Anyway, it locked the System as had been promised since 10.6 and developers who ignored that found their apps no longer worked properly if at all. Yes, SIP can be defeated but you open it up to the glaring security issues present in Mavericks.

Now that OS 10.11 is on its 5th release and integrates with iOS 9.3, I'm liking it a lot.

It would certainly be nice if criminals would stop trying to steal from us but, until that happens, email and OS builds will have to try to keep up (I have Yahoo bizmail and detest it—I'll live) Living in the Sillie Con Valley as I do, I have two words for most of the bitching and moaning about the current reality: Windows 10.

The best advice for anyone staying with any older OS is to keep your machine away from the Internet. It's only going to get worse.

stubbsonic wrote:As for getting audio to & from your iOS device, there are very good options without needing El Cap. Secret Base Design has their MUSIC i/o apps, for example. You install something on your mac and something on your iOS device and you can run audio & MIDI between them.

I'm trying to make a list of every OSX/iOS conduit that hasn't been developed by Apple. So, thanks for the mention of Secret Base Design apps. I'll check out out.

I'm wondering if Mike's more positive experience of Mac OS's is based on his enhanced ability to solve minor (and major) problems. Whereas the average user might get stuck more easily. Just sayin.

Quite possibly, but that's not a good thing if you need that sort of expertise to run a mass market OS. Like needing a live in mechanic to keep your car running.