Music Tech iMacs

[tom_pearson]

The music dept in our school is becoming increasingly dependent on Macs, and I've been tasked with looking after them. We currently have 10 iMacs running Logic Pro 9, Sibelius 5 and have M-Audio KeyStudio's.

The Macs haven't been as reliable as I'd hoped. My experience with Macs and Music Tech in the past has been very good.

 

One of the main problems is with Kontakt Player, which is Sibelius' audio playback engine. It randomly isn't available to select as the primary playback device. I think this will be resolved when we move to Sibelius 6, which doesn't rely on a separate audio engine.

Does any one have the same kind of setup?

 

The Music dept are looking to buy more iMacs in the future, and I will have to look into integrating them with AD. Is this a good idea for Music based Macs? i.e. will music software work under multiple network user accounts?

 

Any advice on the subject will be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks

[3s-gtech]

I've found integrating with AD is great overall. However - you'll probably need an alternative setup with home drives. As our iMac are used for Music tech as well as KS3-KS5 Music, they need their network home drives. Logic Pro 9 doesn't seem to like saving to these, so I have to get them to save to the Shared documents area on the local disc, then drag it into their home areas. Same with iMovie. Garageband doesn't have these problems though. Other than a small issue with overviews not working in Logic, they seem okay otherwise.

[Robbocop]

There are a couple of issues we've come across which you need to be aware of. The most likely scenario for your problem is a permissions error detailed here http://www.sibelius.com/helpcenter/article.php?id=560&languageid=1&searchid=3767859 Also, Sibelius' player can only be used by Sibelius, yet it's an Audio unit. This means that Logic and Garageband can attempt to load it, and generally you'll see an error message to say that the player isn't available. If Garageband has attempted to use it and failed, it can sometimes disappear from Sibelius until you reboot. We normally only see that in a new set up where users are logging in to different Macs that they haven't used before. After that the user prefs should remember that Sibelius Sounds is switched off in Garageband. On networked, managed machines you'll get other odd things like missing Sibelius fonts, as by default Sibelius will try to put the fonts in the user's Fonts folder, not the machine one. Move them and they're fine. Sibelius can be a bit strange both combined with other applications and when on a network. Given that all Macs come with Garageband you'd hope the Audio Unit thing would have been solved by now...

[tom_pearson]

There are a couple of issues we've come across which you need to be aware of. The most likely scenario for your problem is a permissions error detailed here http://www.sibelius.com/helpcenter/article.php?id=560&languageid=1&searchid=3767859 Also, Sibelius' player can only be used by Sibelius, yet it's an Audio unit. This means that Logic and Garageband can attempt to load it, and generally you'll see an error message to say that the player isn't available. If Garageband has attempted to use it and failed, it can sometimes disappear from Sibelius until you reboot. We normally only see that in a new set up where users are logging in to different Macs that they haven't used before....

 

This is all really helpful, thank you! In fact we're currently experiencing the problems that you've mentioned. I'll have a play around with this over half term. Cheers =)

[rbelson]

Quite a lot of these issues can be resolved through the implementation of Portable Home Directories as the home is located in the /Users folder during the class with its contents being synced back to the server in the background and at logout.

 

As suggested most things can be overcome by redirecting directories and applying custom preferences.