Well I got my mail back. All it took was pre-installed Lion VM and a copy of VMWare fusion. Both courtesy of BitTorrent, because if I have to go thru this much effort to get access to my old email, then software companies deserve to be stolen from. You heard me. Don’t give me that look VMWare, blame Steve Jobs for making any of this necessary in the first place.
Anyway since going back to a clean install of Snow leopard my macbook feels almost brand new. Well, not really, but it has that fresh install feeling that’s a lot like the New Car Smell. Everything is uncluttered and unbloated, and I just can’t wait to dirty it up with all my applications again. Actually it’s already somewhat sullied, I didnt waste much time in reconstructing my old user experience – Chrome, VLC, Transmission, Adium, etc etc. What is missing however are my ‘pro’ apps, more specifically all my music shit. I don’t really have an immediate need for it, but I want to have my tools around if by some miracle inspiration of some kind does strike me. I’m not entirely eager to give up that fresh install feeling just yet though, so I’m reluctant to just install everything I had before the wipe – a lot of it i never used.
When I first started producing I loved Reason, but now I’ve pretty much given up on it as production tool – it’s a nicely contained toolbox and great for getting started but its a walled garden approach to music creation that I found too limiting eventually. The synths are pretty great – Thor was ridiculously powerful and ReDrum is still my favorite soft drum machine, but not being able to use 3rd party plugins is basically a deal breaker, and using ReWire to get access to the Reason instruments in another DAW always seemed like a pain in the ass and an unnecessary drain on system resources.
Logic is my DAW of choice. I never liked Ableton Live (or Simpleton as i prefer to call it. Disabledon if I’m feeling less PC). Live users complain Logic is too complex, but I always found it pretty intuitive and as a DAW its flexibility and power is unmatched. By contrast, I hated the Live interface after about 3 minutes of use, the best it could come up with was essentially just good idea that was really poorly implemented. Still tho, I know people who swear by it, so maybe it’s just a matter of what you came to first.
The question on my mind now is what version of Logic to go back to. The gadget nerd in me obviously wants to run the latest and greatest version, currently 9.1.5, and since version 8 was released in 2007, it’s arguably well past time for an upgrade. On the other hand, my laptop is also a 2007 model so Logic 8 was pretty much written to run on my machine. It ran pretty much flawlessly for years and most of my work has been done using version 8. Upgrading to 9 was when I started having problems with stability and plugin compatibility, so after this whole re-installation mess, I am wondering if I should just accept that with the age of my laptop taken into question, I am better off sticking with old tech from the same era.
I’ve also considered that upgrading the software without upgrading the system underneath is really only half an upgrade. The usual separation of hardware and software in the computer world makes it easy for us to think of them as 2 distinct components, but a musician really needs to think of it more in terms of a digital hardware synthesizer, where the software and hardware are inexorably tied to one another. When I was first posting about the version dilemma I didn’t really want to downgrade to 8 after going to 9, but really after using 9 for a brief period I’ve come to the conclusion that there are not really any tangible benefits in moving to 9 but a there are a number of fairly compelling reasons not to. Essentially I would gain the ability to run in 64 bit mode at the expense of being able to use most of my old plugins and less stability in general. My laptop only had 4GB of RAM anyway so 64 bit doesn’t really offer any advantages over 32 bit. When it comes down to it, Logic 9 was designed for computers that are much newer than mine.
But perhaps the most telling factor to consider is that if there was much difference to the user experience and the features available between versions 8 and 9, I didn’t really notice – which either mean’s there really is nothing to be gained…. or I am just too much of a n00b to be capable of getting the full potential out of it 
