luminousmonkey.org

Moving from Windows to OSX

Monday 17 May 2010, 20:54 WST —

I’ve always liked developing software on a *nix based system, generally this means Linux, but I’ve recently been using OpenSolaris because, well, it’s better than Linux. Anyway, there has always been OSX, and I did used to own an iMac, which was nice.

However, it’s very hard to upgrade the video hardware in any Mac, besides the lovely, but very expensive MacPros. And as I do like gaming on my PC as well, it’s kinda something that is a bit important to me at times.

Anyway, I’ve managed to get OSX running on my PC hardware, there’s plenty of websites on how to go about it, so I’m not going to repeat them here, Google is your friend. So now I’m running OSX Snow Leopard, the only problem I seem to have is that I can’t enable my full 8GB of RAM, and I have to run at only 4GB. Besides that however, everything else seems to work just fine. Even my Geforce 295.

The only other problem is finding software that does certain tasks in a way that I’m used to on Windows, so I thought I would just mention a few in case it can help anyone else out.

Games

Steam has just come to the Mac, so I think that pretty much solves the problem for me. For the last few years, I have only ever used Steam to buy my PC games, and Valve’s recent support for Mac now means that I can do the same under OSX. With the added advantage that when I buy a copy for my PC, I get the Mac version for free. With the support of Steam, I’m hoping that the Mac will get some more support from game developers.

Music

This is a pretty important one for me, I pretty much always have music playing when I’m at my computer, so it’s important that I can at least have a music player that I can live with. On Windows, I always used Foobar as my music player of choice. It supports pretty much all music formats under the sun you could think of, it’s pretty customisable, and supports ReplayGain.

When it comes to OSX however, seriously, iTunes is probably the best option, all other music players just don’t seem as nice, which now gives me some problems.

No FLAC support

iTunes doesn’t (and probably never will, support FLAC properly. This actually isn’t much of a problem now. iTunes has always supported Apple Lossless, which, seems to me, produces a smaller file size than FLAC did. So basically I can recode all my FLAC files to Apple Lossless.

Now this has always been an option, so why wasn’t I using iTunes on the PC then? Well, because I also have an iPhone. If I did have my entire music collection in iTunes, I would need to keep two copies of tracks about. The lossless ones for playing on the desktop, and the lossy ones for syncing with my iPhone. However, the new version of iTunes (at least on OSX) now supports encoding of lossless to lossy when syncing. So now all I have to do is manually manage tracks to sync on my iPhone, but don’t have to keep two copies, and re-encode tracks I want to sync.

No replaygain support

This one is kinda important for me, ReplayGain addresses the issue of having a mixture of CDs that have been normalised to different levels, basically this is a problem when you have your music player set to random. You will some find some tracks are really quiet, so you’ll turn up the volume, and then it will switch to a much louder track, and you’ll be deafened.

iTunes does have support for pre-calculated volume adjustment, it’s called Soundcheck. However, the problem with Soundcheck, is that it does per-track normalisation, this is bad. On an album, say for example Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon, you will find that with Soundcheck results in the volume of the tracks jumping all over the place. The volume should be normalised based over the whole album. iTunes does not support this…

However, with a bit of searching, I found iVolume. This program when set correctly, will calculate and set the Soundcheck setting so each track in an album is set to the same level. This means no jumping up and down in volume, and also that the normalisation will work across albums as well.

Well, that’s it for now.