Mad Money Machine

Shifting to Mac Hastened

Remember that new Dell XPS I bought off eBay to help rescue my previous DELL XPS that failed? And remember that it worked, right, I got my data off the hard disks. Whew, that was nice.

Now guess what? The sound is gone. No audio. Mute. I have tried everything that is reasonable including replacing the sound card from my old XPS onto this one, downloading new audio card driver software, and switching things around. No joy. It just ain’t fun watching YouTube videos with no sound.

But the biggest problem is that I can no longer use Adobe Audition on the PC to record and edit my shows. Sure, I’ve recorded and edited shows on the MacBook in GarageBand. But Audition is the super-ultra-supremo-king of audio editing. I’ve got all the keyboard shortcuts down and can whiz through a show faster than real time now. Not so in GarageBand.

And from what I’m reading on the net, nothing on a Mac is as good as Audition. Some say that Soundtrack Pro from the Final Cut Studio 2 is pretty good, but guess how much that want for that sucker? $400? Nope. $800? Nope. Try north of $1500! Yikes. Can I get a TARP for that?

So I hang my head and commit to GarageBand. Hey, I even tried running Audition under Windows 7 under VMWare Fusion on the MacBook. Hardee har har har on that one. Sounds like this, “a. et. ip. o. ot.” Seems to get about every 1/2 second of sound out.

So Mac here we come full force. I have a countdown list of PC-only applications that I’m trying to figure out how to migrate from. Luckily, none of them require sound. So I can still run them for a while until I figure it out. They are: Fidelity Active Trader Pro (don’t chastise ME!), Microsoft Expression Web, Microsoft Excel, Natara Bonsai outliner, and of course my iTunes library. I’ll let you know how it goes.