ANGERRRRRRRRRRRRR!

The first comment on this blog article was an idiotic Mac zealot one, Peter’s response was correct.

I standby my ’so much for the media infrastructure’ comment. The Mac has a great driver model, Core Audio. There’s nothing else about it that makes working with audio superior other than that a typical Mac Pro is a higher specced ‘PC’ than an off the shelf Dell. But people build Mac-like PC’s specific to audio work, and then the comparison is reduced to which audio software you want to use.

I still don’t know why you have to be so defensive Fred, I’ve praised the Mac here for what it’s good for, and criticised it for what it’s not so good for, something you’d have found if you spend an equal amount of time with both Windows and OSX. As a user of both platforms I’m tired of one sided arguments based on brand loyalty rather than empirical evidence.

Don’t feed the trolls.

btw: i remember reading a test where they connected a pc without av or firewall to the internet. in only 5 minutes there were files coming from the net on the pc. not every file is harmful of course, but i just don’t believe that ’safe surfing’ stops intrusion.

nice pac/mac discussion you got there…

does that in some way change the fact that it costs $500 extra for the same hardware? or did you have some actual point you were trying to make in your idiotic, hysterical rants that make utterly no sense?

some of us are trying to talk windows here. it is not a conversation to dis OS X, which i use regularly. so smarten up.

windows XP, that you denigrate so much, will run on just about any computer made in the last ten years. go figure.

http://www.softpointer.com/AudioShell.htm

Comparatively Windows Explorer is still way more usable for audio files (I’m talking XP here, not Vista with the 30 different buttons and file menu locations and icons that look like kids threw some blocks and paint at a screen)

But, regardless, the best shell extension I have is made by Softpoint who also make Tag N Rename, the tagging app. It’s called Audioshell and basically adds some great functionality to inspect audio files, plus it adds a few more ’sort by’ options to your standard windows.

It’s very useful being able to instantly see samplerate, bitrate, number of channels, compression bitrates, duration of audio files..etc etc These are functions already built into the Windows explorer but audioshell gives you more like all tag info, editable, embedded images and comments. I find the comments padded tag very useful for typing little reminders next to pretty much any audio file, that you can see just browsing audio folders.

At the very least, people should right click on the grey bar just at the top of any explorer window where size/type etc are, and enable the built in options of samplerate/bitrate/duration. So much for the mac having the superior media infrastructure….

A shell extension that’s very much worth using is Filebox Extender — I set up my various samples, presets, and renders folders as favorites, and I can jump straight to them in almost every plugin and app. (I just wish Alchemy used a standard file browser instead of its crippled custom thing.)

I suppose one could do a similar thing with subst, but it wouldn’t be as elegant.