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[Tom Hester]

Looking to upgrade my old Macbook Pro to a new Retina, with 16gig of ram and a SSD drive. My old MBP is a few OS(s) old, never updated. Basically my question is this;

Will I run into any issues putting my Smaart license on the new Mac? I assume its fine, but I use it almost daily and cant really afford the downtime.

Already realizing my USBPre (1) is not going to work with the new OS.

[Preston Soper]

Looking to upgrade my old Macbook Pro to a new Retina, with 16gig of ram and a SSD drive. My old MBP is a few OS(s) old, never updated. Basically my question is this;

Will I run into any issues putting my Smaart license on the new Mac? I assume its fine, but I use it almost daily and cant really afford the downtime.

Already realizing my USBPre (1) is not going to work with the new OS.

That will be a very efficient machine with the SSD & 16 gig of ram.
Buy as you wish it to always be thanks to the new Apple manufacturing design in the MBP RD.
The RAM is now soldered to the logic board, making future memory upgrades impossible and the battery is glued to the case.
The SSD isn’t upgradeable either (yet), It is a separate daughtercard, and may offer an upgrade in the future.
Transferring your license is very easy and shouldn't cause any delays in personal use.

http://www.rationalacoustics.com/files/Smaart7_Installation_ReadMe2_FINAL.pdf

From the Rational Website:

Moving a License to a New Computer or Reinstalling after an Upgrade
When you want to retire a computer from active use as a Smaart workstation and reclaim the activation used for that machine for your available installations pool, you will need to deactivate or “block” the Smaart installation on that machine. Deactivating an installation renders it unusable on that machine until/unless it is reactivated (we'll get to that in a moment).
Reformatting or replacing your computer's hard disk drive will cause your Smaart Machine ID to change, essentially making the program think that it's running on a new computer. You will need to deactivate Smaart from your computer prior to making any major hard disk reformats or replacements in order to reclaim the activation for that machine and allow for re-installation once the system changes are complete.
In both cases, you must deactivate before uninstalling Smaart from the machine completely.
Figure 4: Smaart's About Dialog
To deactivate a Smaart 7 installation go to the About dialog for the program and click the Deactivate Installation button. On a Windows PC, the About dialog is accessible from the help menu. On a Macintosh computer, select “About” from the File menu.
Clicking the Deactivate Installation button in the About window will take you to a screen asking you to confirm the deactivation. When you do so, Smaart will automatically attempt to register it with the my.rationalacoustics.com web site. If the attempt was successful you will get a confirmation message telling you that your deactivation was received and accepted. If not, you will see a screen similar to the one below.
Figure 5: Successful Deactivation Dialog
7
If Smaart is unable to connect to the web site for some reason, make a note of your block code and machine ID then open a Web browser and go to the my.rationalacoustics.com to confirm deactivation.
The process is as follows:
1. Login to your account at my.rationalacoustics.com and click the link for Your Software Licenses on the navigation bar at the top of the landing page.
2. Click on your Smaart 7 license and find the machine you want to deactivate in your list of current installations.
3. Click “[release]” in the Actions column.
4. Enter your Block Code from Smaart along with your name and e-mail address in the fields provided and click the Submit button. You should see your available installations increase by 1 following a successful deactivation.
Note that your machine ID and block code are also displayed a three activation screen that comes up if you attempt to run Smaart again after deactivation. So if you inadvertently closed the screen above without recording those numbers or write down one of them incorrectly, you can always get back to them. We recommend that you hold off on uninstalling Smaart on the deactivated machine until you have confirmed the deactivation, just in case.

[Tom Hester]

That will be a very efficient machine with the SSD & 16 gig of ram.
Buy as you wish it to always be thanks to the new Apple manufacturing design in the MBP RD.
The RAM is now soldered to the logic board, making future memory upgrades impossible and the battery is glued to the case.
The SSD isn’t upgradeable either (yet), It is a separate daughtercard, and may offer an upgrade in the future.
Transferring your license is very easy and shouldn't cause any delays in personal use.

Thanks for the info.

As far as ram and HD space. I am using 80gigs currently, so i think 250gigs will be sufficient for the life of this machine. Hopefully 16g of ram is enough to get me through 3-4 years (average life span of past computers before I upgrade).

[Mark McFarlane]

Looking to upgrade my old Macbook Pro to a new Retina, with 16gig of ram and a SSD drive. My old MBP is a few OS(s) old, never updated. Basically my question is this;

Will I run into any issues putting my Smaart license on the new Mac? I assume its fine, but I use it almost daily and cant really afford the downtime.

Already realizing my USBPre (1) is not going to work with the new OS.

Smaart 6 for OSX, or an older Windows version?  FYI, Apple hasn't supported Windows XP under Bootcamp since Lion came out last year.  If you have XP installed already and upgrade OSX you are fine but with a new MacBook pro you can't install Windows XP using Apple default Bootcamp setup.  There may be a workaround, I don't know.

You might also check and make sure Smaart and your audio interface both work on Mountain Lion.  It's only been released for a month or so...  Probably not a problem, but worth a look.

[Rasmus Rosenberg]

Preston,
What would you recommend an I5 or I7 ?? im in the process of upgrading too.
mvh
R

[Rob Spence]

I got the i7 as I was told it has better I/o and I use mine for multitrack recording.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Preston Soper]

Preston,
What would you recommend an I5 or I7 ?? im in the process of upgrading too.
mvh
R

Core i5 vs i7
 
Core i5-equipped systems will be less expensive than Core i7-equipped systems.
Essentially, the Core i7 processors have more capabilities than Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs.
For the most part, you'll get faster CPU performance from Core i7 than Core i5.
Most core i7 CPUs are quad-core processors, while Core i5 processors are primarily dual-core.
There are dual-core Core i7 processors, and in some desktops you may find quad-core Core i5 processors.
Hyperthreading allows the CPU to sort of do two things at a time on each core for a total of 4 things at once.
Dual core i7 (2 cores, possible 4 instructions at a time).
Quad Core i7 has four CPU cores, plus hyper threading to essentially do 8 things at once.
The i5 processor has a maximum of 6MB of (L3)cache onboard.
This is where the processor stores repeat instructions (for heavy calculations)
The i7 processor has anywhere from 8MB to 15MB of that same cache.

[Tom Hester]

Smaart 6 for OSX, or an older Windows version?  FYI, Apple hasn't supported Windows XP under Bootcamp since Lion came out last year.  If you have XP installed already and upgrade OSX you are fine but with a new MacBook pro you can't install Windows XP using Apple default Bootcamp setup.  There may be a workaround, I don't know.

You might also check and make sure Smaart and your audio interface both work on Mountain Lion.  It's only been released for a month or so...  Probably not a problem, but worth a look.

Windows is not an issue. I run Smaart 7 on OSX

[Arthur Skudra]

Looking to upgrade my old Macbook Pro to a new Retina, with 16gig of ram and a SSD drive. My old MBP is a few OS(s) old, never updated. Basically my question is this;

Will I run into any issues putting my Smaart license on the new Mac? I assume its fine, but I use it almost daily and cant really afford the downtime.

Already realizing my USBPre (1) is not going to work with the new OS.

I recently bought a new 17" MBP i7 2.5 GHz, 16 GB Ram, Mountain Lion 10.8.2, and have yet to experience any problems running Smaart 7.4 with the Roland Octacapture.  It's fast!  I did an experiment a few weeks ago and ran 15 simultaneous mics into Smaart for analysis of an arena system, along with Parallels desktop running in the background controlling the DSP...handled it just fine with CPU to spare!  See my thread in the Rational forum on how to set it up.  I don't know what interface you're planning to use, but make sure it is compatible with what you're planning to use it with.

[Arthur Skudra]

Smaart 6 for OSX, or an older Windows version?  FYI, Apple hasn't supported Windows XP under Bootcamp since Lion came out last year.  If you have XP installed already and upgrade OSX you are fine but with a new MacBook pro you can't install Windows XP using Apple default Bootcamp setup.  There may be a workaround, I don't know.

You might also check and make sure Smaart and your audio interface both work on Mountain Lion.  It's only been released for a month or so...  Probably not a problem, but worth a look.

XP runs perfectly fine on my new MBP either virtually via Parallels desktop, or in XP compatibility mode via Windows 7 running in bootcamp (you need Windows 7 professional to do this).  I have yet to see a need to run XP by itself in bootcamp.

[Tom Hester]

I recently bought a new 17" MBP i7 2.5 GHz, 16 GB Ram, Mountain Lion 10.8.2, and have yet to experience any problems running Smaart 7.4 with the Roland Octacapture.  It's fast!  I did an experiment a few weeks ago and ran 15 simultaneous mics into Smaart for analysis of an arena system, along with Parallels desktop running in the background controlling the DSP...handled it just fine with CPU to spare!  See my thread in the Rational forum on how to set it up.  I don't know what interface you're planning to use, but make sure it is compatible with what you're planning to use it with.

Awesome, I am probably going to buy the Roland box.

[Greg_Cameron]

I got a Retina MBP right away when the were released here at my day job since we're a Thunderbolt video peripheral developer. I got the top of the line configuration i7 with the biggest SSD and RAM they could stuff in there. That machine is hella powerful for it's size. It's the first laptop I've used that can encode Sony's XDCAM EX codec in realtime without dropping frames, no small feat. With 16GB of RAM, it will handle anything you would need to throw at it for a few years at least. As far as upgrading the SDD, OWC already has a 480GB kit available and I suspect larger ones will follow in the future. IMHO, you can't go wrong getting one of these. They're a beast. With the dual Thunderbolt ports, you can hook up hardcore RAID disk storage, video capture devices, ProTools peripherals, etc. operating at up to 10Gb/second.

[Mark McFarlane]

... I have yet to see a need to run XP by itself in bootcamp.

The need is there for those of us that only have a license for Windows XP. 

Windows 7 Pro (required for XP support) costs $299 for a new version.  (In the past I think Bootcamp didn't work with upgrade versions, but the Win7 upgrade is still $199...)  A new netbook can be had for a few dollars more.  I'd rather buy a new mic or a netbook rather than spend $299 on Windows 7.

By comparison, Mac OSX Mountain Lion cost $19. I understand the business model, Apple doesn't really care about software, they want everyone running the latest version.  Microsoft has to make money on software, just not my money. 

I was for many years a Windows developer, fan, and Microsoft stock holder.  I moved to Mac at the time of XP.  Now I don't touch Windows (at home) except for the few pieces of live audio hardware/software that I own that require it.

[Arthur Skudra]

The need is there for those of us that only have a license for Windows XP. 

Windows 7 Pro (required for XP support) costs $299 for a new version.  (In the past I think Bootcamp didn't work with upgrade versions, but the Win7 upgrade is still $199...)  A new netbook can be had for a few dollars more.  I'd rather buy a new mic or a netbook rather than spend $299 on Windows 7.

By comparison, Mac OSX Mountain Lion cost $19. I understand the business model, Apple doesn't really care about software, they want everyone running the latest version.  Microsoft has to make money on software, just not my money. 

I was for many years a Windows developer, fan, and Microsoft stock holder.  I moved to Mac at the time of XP.  Now I don't touch Windows (at home) except for the few pieces of live audio hardware/software that I own that require it.

You can always install XP as a virtual machine in OSX in either VMWare or Parallels desktop.  I run some legacy hardware with XP in Parallels desktop, very rarely do I boot up in bootcamp, in fact I find it inefficient to boot up in bootcamp unless I'm doing something specific that requires bootcamp (firewire interface).  No need to buy Windows 7 professional in your case.  If you look carefully, you can get a Parallels desktop or vmware license for $40-50.  An absolutely valuable tool for any sound professional running OSX.

[Mark McFarlane]

You can always install XP as a virtual machine in OSX in either VMWare or Parallels desktop.  I run some legacy hardware with XP in Parallels desktop, very rarely do I boot up in bootcamp, in fact I find it inefficient to boot up in bootcamp unless I'm doing something specific that requires bootcamp (firewire interface).  No need to buy Windows 7 professional in your case.  If you look carefully, you can get a Parallels desktop or vmware license for $40-50.  An absolutely valuable tool for any sound professional running OSX.

Thanks Arthur.  I do own Parallels 7.  I have a professional video camera that operates remotely off firewire (Canon XH-A1), streams to disk, and only has a Windows client, so unfortunately I need Bootcamp for that when I video gigs.  I've also had a lot of problems with Sabine's Navigator DSP software running under Parallels 7 over USB (DSP remote software hangs when I change certain DSP parameters) so when I go to gigs I boot Windows to keep everything simple.  I might go back some day and see if I can get Navigator stable under Parallels, but I already wasted an afternoon on it. 

My digital rig is already too complicated with about 8 devices, Parallels is just another complication.  I've actually been thinking about just buying a cheap Netbook to keep in one of my FOH crates and leaving my expensive 17" MB Pro at home.  This would avoid other problems like the gig I forget to bring the power supply for the MB Pro...  It was a long night, I'm afraid I have become too reliant on Studio Manager and had a hard time doing some obscure patches from the console.

[Rasmus Rosenberg]

WHen will the new mac book pro 13" retina be released? I guess it will be worth the wait, better display and SSD disk? Or not worth the xtra cost?

mvh
R

[Mark McFarlane]

WHen will the new mac book pro 13" retina be released? I guess it will be worth the wait, better display and SSD disk? Or not worth the xtra cost?

mvh
R

Rumors say October. We'll see.  On the 15" its a $400 differential for retina and SSD.

[ProSoundWeb Community]