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ipod - viva la mac

this weekend after doing vocal tracks all day saturday, i set up my new ipod. right now i've got almost 300 songs loaded and just that number seems plenty. this morning i read on my favorite website an article about the 21st aniversary of the macintosh.

as of this coming august i will have been a mac user for ten years. i remember a few months before going to university, my best friend casey uttered some mantra about getting a mac because they were more user friendly and creative. at the time (i was 20) i just wanted to figure out my recording gear and drum machine.

as luck would have it my roommate in college, steve wilson, was a mac-head. he was using a mac '94 model performa 6116 if i remember correctly. my introduction to the mac, photoshop and the internet began in the late summer of '95. a few months later, obviously informed by steve's knowledge and guidance and my enthusiasm, my girlfriend at the time got a new performa that xmas. this completely eliminated the need for me to get a computer, which was great, because i was living off of the gov'ment.

within a year i was already deconstructing drum beats and samples in a mac beta application that allowed you to record, import and edit digital audio. those mac performas are so slow compared to today's mac, that they wouldn't be able to load a simple web browser today. but back in '95 they were pretty flash.

by the late 90's i began recording entirely in protools or motu's digital performer. of course the never-ending album we are working on has been recorded almost entirely in protools. software / hardware and processing has become so fast now, that we have actually been recording and editing the ashes album with mac laptops.

the only tracks for the new album not recorded in protools were a few songs worth of drum tracks, which were recorded in hi resolution on a mid-90's e-mu darwin. of course we then transfered into protools. i spend several hours per week just editing. i would say that at least 1,000 hours has been spent working in protools for this album.

web design, posters, layout, graphics, audio/editing, image scanning, web surfing, research, e-commerce, image editing, dvds, mastering, mp3's, video editing, etc... my life in a big way exists on a mac, and i'm happy about it. i'm not afraid to admit that i am a geek. albeit, my geeking around with audio on a mac has gotten me on the radio numerous times.

now that the ipod line is officially the first real cultural icon of the new century, and the apple market share of the mp3 player market borders on a monopoly, apple might be poised to reach perhaps 8-10% of the pc market.

ok, that's my rant.

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