Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Admin: MacBook replaces lemon Windows notebook

I won't bore everyone with details about the last rites on my old notebook, but suffice it to say that the manufacturer agreed to fully refund the purchase price of the notebook and I am back to blogging again.

What may not be so boring is that I replaced that Windows notebook with a MacBook.  The MacBook has a dual core Intel processor and is running both Apple's OS-X and Microsoft's Windows XP Pro.  The Windows operating system is running in virtualization mode using a program called Parallels (note: I had to purchase a copy of Windows and Parallels separately, but they were fairly inexpensive).

As far as audio and video processing goes, I have been able to load and run Acoustica, Audacity, Audition, Clarifying Technologies, and Signalscape on the MacBook and all have worked in real-time for the types of files I tested with.  Due to work commitments, I have not been able to take enough time to "make friends" with the native Mac sound and video applications, but hope to do that slowly over the next few months. I'll report back my on observations.  If anyone has a preference as to a specific application for audio or video forensics they would like me to give priority to, just let me know in the comments or off-line.

In the meantime, Brian Dipert (Senior Technical Editor over at EDN) has also been transitioning over to a MacBook and has blogged about his experiences in several posts, this one being the latest as of this writing.

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