Smooth Operators

Feb 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Jason Blum and Markkus Rovito

EVERYTHING IN ITS RIGHT PLACE

Leopard's Spaces system takes a big step beyond the Exposé features of earlier versions, which show a separated view of all the open windows. Spaces lets you configure and move among multiple Desktops, each with its own programs that it hosts exclusively.

In the Spaces System Preferences, you set the number of Spaces you want from two to 16. You then go about choosing applications and assigning them to a particular Space. Finally, you set the keyboard shortcuts to navigate the Spaces. For example, you could set your DAW and Propellerhead Reason for Space 1, an audio editor for Space 2 and a Web browser to Space 3. Then, the next time you launch each of those apps, they will open automatically in their particular Space, which is basically a separate Desktop reserved for those programs. Your assigned Spaces keyboard shortcut splits your display into a live view of all the Spaces at once and lets you navigate to the one you want to use. It's all very easy to set up and quite handy for making a single-monitor system feel like it has more screen real estate. I preferred to launch Spaces using the fourth button of a mouse rather than using one of the “F” keys, which are often better used as shortcuts in certain DAWs.

For those Mac users who love them, Leopard still includes the Exposé keyboard shortcuts, and in fact, you can use them while you are in the Spaces view, which can invoke some “WTF?” stares from onlookers.

GOTTA GO BACK IN TIME

It's always a good idea for computer musicians to have at least one external hard drive for either recording to, storing samples or both. With Leopard, you'll want to add either another external hard drive, an internal drive (if possible) or create a partition to your external drive for using Leopard's new Time Machine automatic data backup. Time Machine is Apple's way of making data backup as cool and painless as possible. All you have to do is open the Time Machine System Preferences and then choose the drive (other than the internal boot drive) that you want to use as the backup disk. It then starts by making a copy of everything from your main hard drive. From then on, it automatically creates a copy of all the new files and programs or files that you edit or change in some way. It keeps backed up versions of files from each hour of the last 24 hours, each day of the last 30 days and each week beyond that. When the backup drive runs out of room, Time Machine starts deleting the oldest weekly backups.

When you want to restore a file, you can launch Time Machine, which probably adds the biggest “wow” factor to Leopard. Against a galactic background, Time Machine shows you a Finder window containing each backup version, and you can browse them backward and forward using arrow keys. A Restore button sends any file back to your main drive. The Mac's updated Migration Assistant also makes it easy to use the Time Machine backups to load your files onto another Mac.

Time Machine promotes peace of mind in a few of different ways. Obviously, if you lose precious data to corruption or accidental deletion, you can recover it right away. But it could also be a lifesaver — for example, in the case of a recording project that has been changed many times over many days. You may get to a point where you realize that you like what you had a week ago better, but the session is radically altered now and you haven't saved different versions. Time Machine will let you retrieve that old version and perhaps teach you to be more diligent next time. Also, if you use FileVault on your data, Time Machine backups will also be fully encrypted and password-protected. And when you want to erase a file completely, there's an option to fully delete all backups of that file.

BEST OF THE REST

The aforementioned features may appeal to neat freaks and efficiency experts, but they only scratch the surface of the Leopard skin. Many users will flip out for Apple's Boot Camp, now out of beta and fully available in Leopard. Boot Camp lets you run Windows XP and Vista software natively on your Mac, using a partition of your internal drive that boots up as a Windows machine (you still have to install your own copy of XP Service Pack 2 or Vista).

Leopard includes major updates to many of Apple's bundled programs. As a brief overview, Preview 4 lets you rearrange PDF pages and merge PDFs, making it possible to organize custom guidebooks from frequently visited sections of software manuals; Safari 3 lets you make custom updating Dashboard widgets from any section of a Web page, so you could, for instance, save the “new threads” area of a favorite user group as a widget; Automator 2 includes a Record button that captures your keystrokes, making it easier to create shortcut actions; iChat 4 includes video and audio recording — useful for saving your chats with collaborators as fodder for documentaries and videos; and Mail 3 has improved searches and mailbox archiving, for cleaning out your e-mails without throwing them away.

ON THE PROWL

While offering full performance and compatibility with existing 32-bit applications, Leopard is optimized to take advantage of 64-bit computing. If that means nothing to you, consider that the Atari 2600 was a 4-bit machine and your typical computer of a year ago was 32-bit. So moving to 64-bit is an exponential leap that means literally billions of times greater power — for example, potentially accommodating 4 billion times the memory of 32-bit apps. Basically, 64-bit is the future, and the transition to it is taking place in the present without yet being widespread. More importantly for now, Apple also optimized Leopard throughout to take advantage of the multicore processor systems installed on all current Macs.

For testing, I wasn't able to make exact comparisons between performance in Leopard and OS 10.4 Tiger because my test Leopard machine was a new Mac Pro, while my Tiger machines were a new MacBook Pro laptop and an older Power Mac G5 desktop. However, Leopard's performance impressed me with both its stability and power. I ran Ableton Live 7 and Logic Pro 8 sessions of 20 tracks or more with plug-ins on each track that never clipped the 10 percent CPU mark, even with several other apps open in different Spaces. While I only used programs that were certified Leopard-compatible by their makers, I experienced great stability, with no program crashes or system freezes.

No incremental OS X update can compare to the epiphany of moving from Mac OS 9 to OS 10.2 Jaguar early in this decade. Personally, I didn't miss OS 9 at all, and OS 10.2 was a revelation for music making and took only a few days to get used to. Overall, stepping up to Leopard — although its new features are unparalleled — felt much like it did when I upgraded to OS 10.3 Panther and OS 10.4 Tiger before it. Going into it, many features interested me, but I wasn't dying to have them. However, just like before, feeling comfortable with the new interface adjustments took almost no time at all, and I didn't want to go back to previous systems.

What it comes down to for Mac users is this: If you like any version of OS X, you'll probably love Leopard. Whether you'll love it enough to pay $129 for the discs or accelerate your purchasing schedule to get Leopard on a new Mac depends largely on how much you're into the organizational, workflow and backup features it showcases. The greatest consideration for anyone is how many of the software programs you need are compatible with the OS. That number is growing by the week and includes the aforementioned Live 7, all of Apple's programs, Reason 3 and 4, Spectrasonics Stylus RMX and most Native Instruments programs, including the Traktor products. Many others, such as Pro Tools and Serato Scratch Live, are not yet officially compatible. As the group of compatible apps fills out, you'll definitely want to make this kitty purr.

For a sidebar on the Leopard compatibility of many major music and pro audio software apps, go to remixmag.com.

APPLE

OS 10.5 LEOPARD > $129

Pros: Many workflow enhancements. Easy automated backups. Powerful, stable platform that will challenge 64-bit software developers. Many major updates to bundled apps. Additional networking features.

Cons: Very cool Back to My Mac feature that lets you browse and access files on a remote Mac requires a separate .Mac account. Not all third-party apps are compatible yet.

Contact: www.apple.com/macosx

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