Mac Studio on the way!

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by jim1960

I've finished all the prep work and tomorrow I'm finally starting the migration to the Mac Studio. My friend and Mac/PT guru, Jack, is coming over to help me with the last things I need to do:
1. Moving my Apple Music folder over to the Mac Studio.
That should be pretty easy.
2. Moving my Mozilla Thunderbird files, including archived emails, from the PC to the Mac Studio.
This is going to be the head scratcher. I've found some info that should be helpful but I'm leery of pulling that trick off on my own.

Once those two things are done, I'm golden. I have all the files I want to move from the PC to the Mac Studio on a portable drive, and anything I'd want to move from the iMac to the Mac Studio is already on ssds in that Thunder3 enclosure to the right and below the iMac.

The monitor on the right is a new Dell S2721QS that I picked up to be my mirrored monitor. The specs (size, resolution, refresh, etc.) match my BenQ SW271. The Dell will be paired with my midi controller; the BenQ will be my main monitor. Since I'm going to make the Mac Studio my main Photoshop computer, it made sense to use the BenQ as the main monitor, and since the 2nd monitor was only going to be used for midi editing, there was no need to blow a lot of money on it.

I remember it took two days when I moved over from my old Mac Pro to the iMac. I expect I'm looking at three days at a minimum this time. Tomorrow might be a bit stressful until the email situation is resolved but things should be pretty straightforward after that.

Thats a pretty cool iMac keyboard stand and remind me what the unit on the far right is (with the green lit buttons) ?

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by KevWind

Thats a pretty cool iMac keyboard stand and remind me what the unit on the far right is (with the green lit buttons) ?

The stand isn't for the keyboard; it's for the iMac. I needed it to raise the computer above the level of the midi controller which is about 5" high. But it also served as a safe place to keep my USB hub so my iLok can't get accidentally damaged. The Mac Studio fits under it pretty nicely so I'm likely going to keep using it. The Dell monitor raises up high enough that the controller won't block it.

The thing on the right is the remote controller for the Dangerous Monitor ST.

[jim1960]

So none of the computer work wound up getting done. When I went to pick up my friend, who I've mentioned before has some form of epilepsy, he had a round of seizures and his wife wound up having to administer the medicine reserved for his worst days. That stuff makes him loopy so we talked about maybe doing it today, but he's still in bad shape. I'm in no rush and my iMac is still running as normal, so no need to hurry this along.

[jim1960]

So we gave setting up the Mac Studio another shot today. I'm glad I had my friend over here because migrating Mozilla Thunderbird from my PC to the Mac was no easy chore. It took a few tries to finally get my archived emails to show up. And then I decided that because I'm going all in with Apple, I should probably use Apple Mail, so we ported everything over to that. That was a lot easier since Thunderbird was already installed and working. Once that was done, we dumped Thunderbird. I was never going to figure all that out on my own.

After that we ported my iTunes/Music files over. That was just shy of 200gb, so that took a bit of time.

Pro Tools is installed and the Carbon is mostly setup now. He was about to do the I/O setup when he fell off the chair and started seizing on the floor. It lasted about 8 minutes. He was able to sit in a chair for a few minutes and then we moved him to the living room couch so he could nap for a bit.

About 30 minutes later he was up but he wanted to go home and get into bed. We started to walk him to the car but we passed the room where we'd been working on the Mac and he walked himself right in and finished up a couple of things which he did correctly despite being in a bit of a stupor. After about ten minutes we convinced him to stop working on the Mac and got him into the car. It's rough to see him going through this.

[jim1960]

One of the downsides to having a lot of virtual instruments is reinstalling them on a new machine. I started with my Toontrack stuff today. That's easily the largest collection and whew! ...this is gonna take a minute.

[KevWind]

That is rough and scary I feel for friend

Yes I only have a few 3 rd party VI and FX plug ins
And about a month ago stupidly deleted everything on my iMac and it was a pain having to re-install and re- authorize all my 3rd party plugs

[Joseph Hanna]

Originally Posted by jim1960

One of the downsides to having a lot of virtual instruments is reinstalling them on a new machine. I started with my Toontrack stuff today. That's easily the largest collection and whew! ...this is gonna take a minute.

Sorry to hear about your friend. Life can be really tough sometimes and I hope he's doin' ok now.

I have two separate hard drives dedicated to backing up all my VI libraries. Too much work re-downloading that much data so I watch this hawk-eyed. I've also invested heavily in each vendor's installation and authorization software. I can re-link VI's with their libraries in an instant. Also, some VI libraries require you to download to the internal drive (which I dislike a lot) but with these software install/auth programs I can drag the libraries anywhere I want and instantly relink.

When you're dealing with Heavyocity, Spitfire, Project Sam, and Native Instrument libraries these applications are well, well worth it.

[jim1960]

Originally Posted by KevWind

That is rough and scary I feel for friend

Originally Posted by Joseph Hanna

Sorry to hear about your friend. Life can be really tough sometimes and I hope he's doin' ok now.

Thanks. What he's going through is nuts. His doctor, who is supposed to be quite good btw, thinks anxiety is worsening his condition in recent months. I'm not surprised at all by that. I think most of use would see a rise in anxiety if our lives were similarly turned upside down.

Despite not having his brain functioning normally, he was still able to sort out my most difficult transition issue which was my email ...and the extra step I added on while he was working on it.

I had been using Mozilla Thunderbird for many years. I like Thunderbird a lot. The GUI is pretty straightforward and user friendly, and it made it easy to store and archive years of various communications that I didn't want to lose.

Migrating Thunderbird from a PC to another PC isn't very hard and I did that once some years ago without any help. Migrating Thunderbird from a PC to a Mac is a whole other animal. I found various suggested methods online and in trying them, my friend was able to transfer my account and settings but none of the methods ported my archived messages over. But Jack is really good at this stuff and he came up with something on his own that worked.

But seeing what a PITA it was to move that stuff, I thought it might be time to future-proof myself by dropping Thunderbird altogether, so while Jack was working on a solution to the first issue, I suggested it might be smart for me to start using Apple Mail since I'm going full-time Apple (the only thing left is my phone and that will change when the iphone15 comes out). So after he got Thunderbird working on the Mac Studio, he set up Apple Mail for me and got all my archived emails over on that app. That step turned out to be pretty simple.

So now it's back to reinstalling plugins and virtual instruments for me.

[mondoslug]

Good luck, sounds like a beast of a Mac, if you find my missing RMX/SAGE folder please let me know.

[jim1960]

I'm nearly PC-free. I moved everything I want to keep from my PC hard drives to a portable Elements drive I was using as the PC backup drive. I'm porting the most important stuff over to the Mac Studio and the rest will go on the ssd drives in the housing I was using with my iMac. I'll have 4TB of storage there, 4TB on the Mac Studio, and 4TB on the fast NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. All that storage is going to be a nice change from the half-tb I had on the iMac.

I still need to grab a lot of stuff from the iMac but I'm going to wait until I get all the plugin work done. I managed a good chunk of that on Saturday. Everything on my iLok that is Mac silicon compatible is installed and I have a list of the things that I need to wait for.

So much work.

[jim1960]

Still not finished fully loading things onto the Mac Studio, but it's at least physically in place. It took a bit of trial and error to figure out a way to organize the various components in a way that was both functional and logistically doable. Some of this could change over time but for now this seems to work for me.

The thing that looks like a Mac Trashcan is a power strip tower and surge protector. Everything on the desk is plugged into that with the exception of the Dangerous Monitor ST controller which gets its power from one of the Furmans in the racks.

The Mac Studio fits nicely under the glass & alluminum riser. The small device on top of the Mac Studio is the ACASIS Thunderbolt 3 40Gbps enclosure which houses a 4 TB Western Digital SN850X NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Up against the right side of the MacStudio is an ACASIS Multi-Port USB 3.0 Hub. I like having this tucked under the riser because it protects my iLok from damage.

To the right of the riser is the CalDigit TS4 Thunderbolt 4 hub and to the right and behind the TS4 is a Thunder3 Quad Mini 4-Bay enclosure which currently has 4TB of SSD storage.

My Wacom tablet and pen are also on the desk and the Redco Little Red Cue Box but that's mostly hidden by the headphones.

It's coming along but there's still tons to do.

[jim1960]

Turns out buying the Mac Studio wasn't my most expensive studio day. This day in 2008 dwarfs it considerably. According to the inflation calculator, that's nearly $13k today.

[jim1960]

Today I spent over an hour tearing the house apart looking for the power supply for my Hammer 88 midi controller. I finally gave up and decided to just bite the bullet and order a new one. I pulled up the manual to see what kind of supply I'd need, and it said, "Power Input: This input accepts an optional third party power supply. A power supply must be connected when using Hammer 88 in stand-alone mode (when triggering external hardware synths). Use a USB cable to power Hammer 88 when connecting to a computer to trigger software synths."

It didn't come with a power supply. I couldn't find it because I never had one and I didn't need it. I had some choice words for myself.

Anyway... I have a proper midi station now with a mirrored monitor. I'm pretty happy with how it all lays out now. Still some cleaning up to do but I'm nearly done.

Oh... and the PC was finally disconnected today. I took off all my personal information and it's ready to get passed along to a friend, along with the keyboard and 4 or 5 mice that I had laying around. Gotta find a day to drop that off but it may have to wait a little. The smoke drifting down from Canada found me today. My world turned an eerie shade of apocalyptic dystopian orange and the air quality is currently "very unhealthy" according to the people measuring those things.

[KevWind]

Originally Posted by jim1960

Today I spent over an hour tearing the house apart looking for the power supply for my Hammer 88 midi controller. I finally gave up and decided to just bite the bullet and order a new one. I pulled up the manual to see what kind of supply I'd need, and it said, "Power Input: This input accepts an optional third party power supply. A power supply must be connected when using Hammer 88 in stand-alone mode (when triggering external hardware synths). Use a USB cable to power Hammer 88 when connecting to a computer to trigger software synths."

It didn't come with a power supply. I couldn't find it because I never had one and I didn't need it. I had some choice words for myself.

Anyway... I have a proper midi station now with a mirrored monitor. I'm pretty happy with how it all lays out now. Still some cleaning up to do but I'm nearly done.

Oh... and the PC was finally disconnected today. I took off all my personal information and it's ready to get passed along to a friend, along with the keyboard and 4 or 5 mice that I had laying around. Gotta find a day to drop that off but it may have to wait a little. The smoke drifting down from Canada found me today. My world turned an eerie shade of apocalyptic dystopian orange and the air quality is currently "very unhealthy" according to the people measuring those things.

Ha! and they call it "The Golden Years " more like Tarnished Copper if ya ask me . I have somehow managed to make my Shure in ear monitors disappear
pretty sure I stashed em where I would remember them --Ya Right

[jim1960]

Still some work to do on the software side but the studio is physically set up now. The dual monitor is also going to be super helpful when I'm recording because for recording I'll be facing the back of the room and will be able to work my daw without having to turn fully around every time. The PC is still in the room but nothing is connected to it.

The rack on the very right of the photo is where I keep most of my microphones except for my tube mics which have larger cases like the green one on top of the gear rack.

And pardon the crooked painting. It's straight now.