21 July 2011

A Mini-Rant

You know, when you have found one program -- one single, solitary program -- that actually works on a PC (as long as the PC is in a semi-cooperative mood), you expect the Mac version of the same program to work just as well, right?

Fat chance.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but if you want to use the sound recording/editing program Audacity, find a PC. The Mac version is not only a major pain in the neck to install, it crashes every five minutes and heaven forbid that you might want to save your project.

And while you're using the program on one of those lowlife PCs, take the time (perhaps while it's spending two minutes to export a two and a half minute song as an MP3) to find a way to contact Audacity's people and demand that they fix their Mac version.

Because maybe your PC is like mine and it takes forever to do anything, never mind coordinating sound and graphic rendering, and it also has like ten gigabytes of remaining space and that's after you clean off all the junk.

And maybe you have a super fast Mac with several hundred gigabytes of storage for the sound files and it also happens to be the computer you sync your iPod with.

And maybe, like me, you would really like to do your importing into the Mac for the aforementioned reasons.

And if the Mac version of the program sucks, there goes an increasing number of your downloads (on Audacity's part) as the number of people buying Macs increases. Macs may still be in the minority for now, but they're gaining steam fast. If you as a software producer don't keep up, you might as well go take a job as a burger flipper. Sure, Audacity is open source and free and therefore nobody's making a profit from it, but if you can make it work almost flawlessly on a system as deeply flawed and persnickety as Windows, you can most likely make it work almost as well on a system as smooth and well-thought-out as Mac OS X.

But even though this is all immensely frustrating, I have to give Apple credit for one thing: if Mac OS X (or a program it's running) is going to crash, at least it does it quickly and gets it over with. You don't sit there looking at the 'busy' cursor for an hour while the hard drive churns and rumbles and strains before finally coming to the conclusion that the program is not responding.

5 comments:

Carissa said...

Oh my word, Macs don't do everything perfectly? Somebody call the presses.

Sarah-Kate said...

I know, right?
I mean, I knew they weren't completely flawless, but it's still annoying when you find out a program you love doesn't work on an otherwise very good system.

Cass said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cass said...

Hi-5 Kate! The other day, I wanted to play my epic PC game on my virtual machine (since I have a Mac), and it said that "This application can no longer run on Virtual Machines". ijdhawiouefhlj;ssfdkjjdksgdjhgdlfg.

So there. I never thought I'd see the day when I actually wanted a Windows PC, but things change... -.-

Sarah-Kate said...

I still have a PC, it's just old and slow and has no more room for anything. And it's a desktop. (The fact that a MacBook is a laptop was a pretty big deal.)

I got Audacity to work a little better Saturday though (on the Mac)... I think I've managed to work around most of the bugs that were annoying me.