Mac user moving to a cross platform environment with XP

[siddhu]

Hi,

As a hard core Mac junkie, I am about to embrace the dark side and become platform agnostic by creating a mixed platform working environment.

I have one key question...Does XP and/or Live running on XP read .aiff files??

Do I need to convert all my .aiff files to .wav if I want to migrate a Live project to a PC?

Are their problems with the .asd files?

Is there someone else who is working in a cross platform situation?

What bugs have you experienced and what are your workarounds?

These are probably relevant question since I think a lot of Mac users are going to want to use PC laptops due to Live's much better performance on PCs.

Additionally, with Steinberg's System Link, it becomes interesting to buy cost effective PCs as a host for VST and VSTi's running inside V-Stack.

Love to hear what recommendation PC users can give newbie Wintel'ers!

Siddhu

[knowa]

just made this switch myself. just be sure that the file suffixes (".aif" ".wav") are part of the file name and you should have no problem using them on both platforms. not sure about ".asd" files as I'm here looking for opinions on the echo indigo line, and don't use live (yet).

additionally, make sure that all your .aifs are REALLY ".aifs" I had a lot of .wavs on my mac too and I mistakenly added ".aif" when renaming my files. when you have the wrong file extension, windows media player can still read it but most audio apps will reject it and say it is corrupt. this was puzzling me for a while.

I strongly prefer XP (Home) to OS9.1, though OSX may be a different story. I was scared of windows, but don't worry about it. once you have both, you'll realize even more how stupid the platform wars are.

though I did suffer one dead pixel which bummed me out for a day, I can definitely recommend the Toshiba M10-S405 with the 1.4 Centrino. great features for the price (but kinda bulky). good luck.

[kentai]

hi knowa,
just curious, how did you transfer your data from your mac to pc? i also switched from os 9.2 to win xp, but i haven't managed to transfer my data from the mac formated fw hd, yet (i was considering the software macdrive, but now i want to try it with os 9 web sharing).

ken

[Guest]

This is a thread really needed in these forums!!

How do we get stuff from mac to pc and back, specifically with Live and other audio thingys..

What is the best way to do this? Via ethernet?

That AIFF thing is a good tip knowa...what else is important?

Do Live sessions REALLY open exactly the same (assuming internal FX)

Does anybody do gigs where they 'share' these files between computers?

Thanks all,
-songCarver

[Guest]

running xp in "windows classic mode" makes everything appear like earlier versions of windows with the light grey bars, etc., which i find to be a lot more appealing of an interface than xp, which i've heard a lot of mac users slag as ugly. just my 2cent on making an easier transition.....48 more cent and ill be in da club, smokin' on some....

[stew]

What is the best way to do this? Via ethernet?

The best way I found for file transfer so far is using Windows File Sharing from OS X over Ethernet or IP over FireWire which is available for OS X as a Developer Preview.

[DJ Methuselah]

I have Mac OS 9.2.2 and Windows 2000 Server. I got Server since it
has a Macintosh File Sharing option. Works fine; the Windows folder
just shows up on the Mac desktop and you can drag files in and out
of it.

The problems is that Win 2000 Pro does not have this feature and
Server is very expensive. I don't know if XP has the feature but I
expect not.

If you have 2K Pro or XP you might be able to get ftp to work. That
protocol is available within web browsers, but you'll have to figure
out how to set up either the Mac or PC as an ftp file server.

[DJCaffeinated]

It's not too hard to use Mac OS X Windows File Sharing to move files around. Just log in from the Windows XP Pro machines. On the OS X side make sure "Allow user to log in from windows" is on for whatever account you're logging in as. I highly recommend the Mac OS X freeware utility SharePoints to share any folder on your Mac using AFP or SMB. (Get it from versiontracker.com) Otherwise you'll only be able to share from the account home folders. Don't really know as much about sharing from Windows XP and logging in from OS X.

[Guest]

hi,
i have finally moved some live stuff from mac to pc now. i used macdrive 5 to read the mac files from the fw hard drive. web sharing of os 9 does also work, but it's quite slow. besides that macdrive can automatically add the file extensions (e.g. '.aif' and '.als') and clean up the file name for windows (e.g. replace '/' with '_'). however the .asd files are not renamed to .aif.asd files (at least i didn't find out how).
some problems i encountered:
i have many aiff files without the '.aif' extension. live does not find such aiff samples (that are part of a live set) when the file extension '.aif' is added to the samples on the windows side. the '.aif' extension has to be added on the mac side and the live set has to be saved again after renaming.
because '/' are not valid in file names on widows, macdrive replaces them with '_'. i had to manually search and replace such samples on windows.
i renamed the '.asd' files to '.aif.asd' on the mac. mac os has a limit of 31 characters for file names. so it was not always possible to rename them. but when a sample is part of a live set, the '.asd' files don't seem to be so important. live just creates a new '.aif.asd' file when opening the live set on windows and the clip settings are ok.
i don't know of any better way. for me the transition was not that smooth.
so i guess if you want to use both platforms, make sure you don't use any illegal characters and that the file extension is always included. then there shouldn't be a problem.

regards
ken

[siddhu]

Thanks for very important the tips Ken!

Siddhu

[siddhu]

Thanks for very important the tips Ken!

Siddhu