Recording - March 2012 - 28

...where we bring you follow-up articles with application hints and upgrade news about gear already reviewed in Recording

Apple MacBook Air and GarageBand ’11
New hardware and new software for a new musicmaking experience
by Mike Metlay

Apple has never been shy about changing how we interact with our computers, if it thinks it’s come up with a better way to do things. There were PDAs and smartphones before the iPhone and iPad, but they now largely define the parameters of how such devices are expected to work. Apple is in the midst of redefining how

and onboard Gigabit Ethernet makes the MacBook Pro simple to integrate into a wired network. That adds up to a comfortingly familiar work environment for the experienced recording musician. In contrast, the MacBook Air is designed from the get-go to travel with you and do what you need it to do with minimal connections to the outside world; that means no network cables tying you down, few if any peripherals for normal use, and—

the venerable Mac interacts with the outside world, too; some things we’ve been used to are going away and being replaced with new ways to move and save data—that can be a little unsettling at first. I recently had the chance to work with a new MacBook Air—a 13" model with 1.7 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a 128 GB solid-state drive—preinstalled with GarageBand ’11 (and Logic Pro 9.1.6, provided by Apple for this review to test file import features). While my original intent was only to quickly review new features in GarageBand ’11, I quickly found that the MacBook Air itself, and how it redefines a recording musician’s workflow, made for a fascinating story. Take to the Air Apple has two laptop computer lines—the 11" and 13" MacBook Air, and the 13", 15", and 17" MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro models have FireWire 800 ports (in addition to USB 2.0 and Thunderbolt) for high-speed hard disks or audio interfaces, and slot-loading optical drives to load software and sound libraries from CD or DVD; the 17" also has an ExpressCard/34 slot for external DSP engines and the like. The 15" and 17" MacBook Pros sport internal graphics processors with dedicated memory that will speed working with video-based audio; the MacBook Pro’s user-swappable hard disk makes bootable-image backups and storage upgrades easy;
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when possible—no power cable, either. (I got nearly 4 hours’ use from the MacBook Air when doing audio work on only battery power—that was with processor sleep disabled and the internal fan running the whole time. Pretty impressive for a computer that doesn’t even weigh 3 pounds!) The MacBook Air has a MagSafe power connection, two USB 2.0 ports, a 1/8" TRS

Figure 1: Audio before (above) and after (below) Flex time edits.

headphone jack, and a Thunderbolt port, and that’s it. No FireWire, no Ethernet, and no optical drive... a scary set of omissions for old-school music users. But for newcomers willing to rethink how a computer talks to the world around it, these few ports turn out to be plenty. You can get a USB-to-Ethernet adapter to put the MacBook Air on a wired network, but it’s really intended to do its networking wirelessly. For file backup, Apple recommends the built-in Time Machine utility, which lets you specify an attached or wireless-accessible external drive for scheduled time-stamped backups. That system makes it more likely you’ll have your recent data after a crash than if you do full bootableimage drive swaps every few months. (Don’t ask me how I know this.) Music users tend to handle very large data files that aren’t trivial to move over wireless, so the speed of the supporting network is important—I moved some Puremagnetik sound sets onto the MacBook Air wirelessly, and I was able to move 1 GB of data in about 3 minutes via the 100BaseT network in the Recording offices, vs. about a half hour on the archaic network in my home studio. The MacBook Air uses a flash-memory solid-state drive (SSD) rather than a conventional hard disk with spinning platters. The main downside of this technology is its cost per Gigabyte of storage— SSDs are frighteningly expensive at capacities we associate with modern hard disk drives, so the budget-minded MacBook Air models come with only 64 to 256 GB of storage. Balancing that are some significant advantages: having no moving parts, SSDs are shockproof and operate silently. They are also relatively fast—so fast that you can do multitrack recording to one while simultaneously running your operating system and DAW from it, a practice which is possible with fast hard disks but rarely recommended. So for most music work, you won’t need to chain an external drive to either of the USB ports, leaving them free for your interface and controller. You’ll notice I haven’t said anything about Thunderbolt; that’s because as of this writing there’s not a lot to say. Thunderbolt (apple.com/thunderbolt) is a very, very fast connectivity protocol—up to 10 GB per second!—that has the potential for networking hard drives, HD video monitors, interfaces, DSP hardware, and more, at speeds

http://www.apple.com/thunderbolt

Recording - March 2012

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