Why I'm not upgrading my audio server to OS X Lion

uglymusic

I've decided to leave Snow Leopard on my 3 1/2 year old White MacBook for the moment. 

Briefly, Snow Leopard is running happily on my MacBook Air, but is giving problems on my iMac. It's running slowly from time to time - on a machine with 12 GB of RAM - and has even crashed three times, I've never had a Mac crash before.

I like Lion's new features, on the whole, but they're irrelevant to my audio server. So I'm staying put with Snow Leopard.

Alan

Do you mean "lion ..... is giving me problems...."?

I tend to agree with your assessment though, especially if Lion is so resource hungry.

Brumjam

Lion has some nice features, but I'd gladly swap them in return for the speed my MacBook Pro used to run at under Snow Leopard. General performance is sloooooow, especially with Adobe Lightroom. They should have called it 'Sloth'....admittedly the advertising wouldn't have looked quite as slick @-)

uglymusic

Do you mean "lion ..... is giving me problems...."?

I tend to agree with your assessment though, especially if Lion is so resource hungry.

"It's running slowly from time to time - on a machine with 12 GB of RAM - and has even crashed three times, I've never had a Mac crash before."

There are also a whole bunch of problems with Safari - spinning beach ball, links from other programs, WebKit-based apps crashing etc etc.

uglymusic

Lion has some nice features, but I'd gladly swap them in return for the speed my MacBook Pro used to run at under Snow Leopard. General performance is sloooooow, especially with Adobe Lightroom. They should have called it 'Sloth'....admittedly the advertising wouldn't have looked quite as slick @-)

This speed issue is interesting. Lion runs only marginally more slowly on my MacBook Air with 1.6GHz Dual Core processor and 2GB RAM, while on the 3.06GHz Dual Core iMac with 12GB RAM, I have intermittent speed problems and these crashes.

I assume, over time, Apple will iron the wrinkles out of Lion.

Alan

I only use my mac for media purposes, to the extent I don't even know where the word processor is on OSX! (I don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed about that...)

For that reason the new features don't interest me, and I haven't yet read that Lion sounds better, except when playing iTunes on it's own.

uglymusic

I only use my mac for media purposes, to the extent I don't even know where the word processor is on OSX! (I don't know whether to be proud or embarrassed about that...)

For that reason the new features don't interest me, and I haven't yet read that Lion sounds better, except when playing iTunes on it's own.

There have been some claims on Computer Audiophile that Lion sounds better than Snow Leopard - speculations have been that Core Audio has gone 64-bit, I think - but there is no consensus.

Uzinusa

I held off a while, but fully Lionised all Macs including media-server macmini and have had no problems.  Not noticed any slowing and really enjoy the new features.  I'd heard the 64-bit aspect of Core Audio as well were a part of Lion.

Monty

All 3 of my Macs are Lionised too without any problems.

I've not noticed any speed issues either. In fact, Amarra seems to be running quicker than before.....

uglymusic

I think I may have figured out the cause of the problems with my Lionised iMac.

I think my Drobo is getting poorly. I disconnected it this morning and the iMac seems a lot happier. I'll see how it goes tomorrow with a full day's work.

sq225917

going 64 bit wouldn't make any difference, all it gives you is more memory addresses. Given that we all have far more ram than required to cache an entire cd what could the possible improvement be? Oh, it might cache from disk for 3 seconds less every 70 minutes- hardly a deal breaker.

uglymusic

going 64 bit wouldn't make any difference, all it gives you is more memory addresses. Given that we all have far more ram than required to cache an entire cd what could the possible improvement be? Oh, it might cache from disk for 3 seconds less every 70 minutes- hardly a deal breaker.

I've been wondering about this, Si

It seems to me that there's another variable here, in addition to the amount of memory addressed. Surely there would be an amount of Core Audio recoding to be done, and the effect of that is unknown to me, at least.