Be Afraid of the Quicktime 7.2 Update

[Synthetik]

It's not always a good idea to blindly click ok whenever the apple software update panel comes flashing up. Apaprently some people on intel macs are having issues with the latest Quicktime 7.2 update hosing rosetta on those machines, mackine them unable to run CFM applications. Since Studio Artist 3.5 is a CFM application i'm posting the link here. Yet another indication that apple is paying way too much attention to iPhones and not enough to the actual mac computer platform (my personal opinion).

[Thorrific]

I haven't updated my Quicktime in a long time because the one time I did quite a while back, it wiped out my Quick Time Pro and I had to buy it all over again.

[Synthetik]

The Quicktime Pro key issue only happens when they bump the main Quicktime version number. I agree it is a drag when you purchased Quicktime Pro and then they make you do it again with a version update. But on the other hand, there have been improvements to codec and fixes for security problems that are worth having.

My rule of thumb for operating system updates these days is to wait a little after they come out and check user forums and places like macintouch.com to see if there are any reported problems. OSX 10.4.10 messed up audio plugins for many people for example. Unfortunately apple seems to be releasing some things these days without adequate testing.

I think part of the Quicktime Pro charge issue (in addition to apple getting some bucks out of you) is that apple has to pay royalties for things like the mpeg support in quicktime and they probably use the pro key charge to defer those costs. I think that's why the mpeg2 codec has an additional charge as well.

[Synthetik]

Well, here's 2 other examples of what i'm talking about. Osx 10.4.10 caused some audio plug-ins to stop working for some people. And Pro Tools version will often will stop working with some incremental releases. So in general i do think it's a good idea to wait a few days after any release and read various bulletin boards to be sure there isn't some problem that could affect you as an individual user. Because trying to move your system back a version can be very difficult for some people, especially if they don't have a backup. In theory, you should always backup before doing any kind of an update, but that often isn't the case for most people.

Different users are going to react to different potential problems differently. If a particular user depended on audio plugins for example for their daily work, blindly updating to osx 10.4.10 could have been a huge problem for them. Other people would never even be aware there was an issue.

I do agree that Apple is churning out updates very quickly these days, so i hope they will provide a fix for the particular problem i mentioned that could potentially affect some Studio Artist users. And if you read the link above about that particular problem they do say it only appeared to be a problem for some people (as opposed to it being a widespread problem for all users) and they give some suggestions you can do that seemed to fix it for people that did experience it. So it could be that when you get your new powerbook and install 7.2 there will not be any issues, or there will as you say be a 7.2.1 update in a few days.

I do understand your concerns, so i will try to comment on them.

As far as Apple not testing various release things enough for legacy support, i would suggest you let them know you would prefer more support and testing.

Our experience here at Synthetik with Studio Artist running on intel macs in emulation mode has been extremely positive. We've never had any problems. And we're also in touch with a large customer base who also are having no real problems running Studio Artist on intel machines. Multi-threaded code takes advantage of the extra cores for extra speed on these machines. Both Studio Artist and MSG Evolver are both totally useful in production situations running today in emulation mode on the intel machines.

As far as native support for Studio Artist, we're working to get version 4 out the door as quickly as possible.

Unlike a company like Adobe, i don't have a large team of programmers and other support personal available to me. The flip side is that Synthetik customers get a level of access and personalized service and support they would never see with a large software company. And without getting too much into the politics of application development, let's just say that apple did not provide much in the way of support for it's 'long time' application developers with some of the issues associated with code transition other than marketing platitudes. I'd be happy to discuss that further off line but this forum is really not the place for me to bitch about the various issues and problems application developers have to deal with.

And the particular path we chose to take with essentially rewriting the core code base of the application is certainly much more intensive than if we had chosen to just deal with patching intel specific issues in the older code base. And Studio Artist is a very large code base with a massive amount of functionality.

In the long run our customers will be better served in the future by the full application rewrite we are doing. If we had just done a 'hack patch' update for intel we might have gotten something out the door quicker and then when apple threw the next curve ball at us we would have had to start all over again. The particular approach we are taking now will leave us with a very robust fully modern code base that will serve us and out customers well for a long time to come. In the short term you're going to have to wait until we get it finished.

[beyond materials]

Is it safe to upgrade yet to QT7.2 or 10.4.10? Or better to wait for the next round of updates? I'm thinking .10 broke some things that were not expecting two digit sub-version numbers so it will be awhile before it's safe to go there.

be

[Synthetik]

I've been holding off on QT 7.2 here waiting for the next Qt release.

As Ben mentions above, he ran into the QT 7.2 problem when he updated but was able to fix it by downloading the osx installer and reinstalling 10.4.10 locally.

I have 10.4.10 on some machines here and 10.4.9 on others. The original 10.4.10 update introduced some sleep crash issues on a dual G5 tower here. And the problem with audio plugins some people have would be a big drag if you need to use those audio plugins. Other than the intermittent sleep crash issues on an old G5 machine 10.4.10 has worked fine for us here.

[Synthetik]

10.4.11 is coming out soon apparently. let's hope it fixes this stuff.

[craig deeley]

John,

The link here seems to lead to a subscriber only article.
Don't suppose you can copy the info out ; )

Sadly (perhaps) this problem has wasted my SA on the Intel Macs (Minis) I am on at work.
At any rate I would have to back pedal down with Quicktime to see and I had to move to the newest QT to not have QT content crash Mail.app.

Still running year old software (2 years old? -getting really old) at home. I have frozen my home machine - where it still works fast and gives me SA with a smile.

I would love to know if there is a way around this block on the work Mini.

Thanks

Craig

[Synthetik]

As Ben mentions above, he got it all to work by downloading the osx 10.4.10 installer manually from apple's web site and then reinstalling 10.4.10 after the quicktime update.

[craig deeley]

Sadly - this did not work for me.
However - am running SA 3.04 - perhaps a wrinkle in the issue.

Craig

[Synthetik]

you could try some searching on the web. macintouch.com was running some info on this, there are probably others. You could also try messaging ben and he might have some suggestions for you to try.