John Cipriano
From: San Francisco
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Posted 6 Apr 2009 5:04 pm
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Don, OS X comes with GarageBand, so I'd start there. It's more for making music with but it will do simple wave editing. I am also a big Cool Edit fan and I will admit that GarageBand is a little simplified from that.
The next thing to try would be Audacity, which is free and open source. From there you could look at commercial wave-editing software. "Wave Editor" is a good one, it's $80. But try the free ones first. http://www.macupdate.com is a good place to look for all kinds of mac software, by the way.
If there are existing Audition projects that you need to be able to open on the Mac, you have a few options for installing whatever version of Audition or CEP that you have. First is Crossover Mac. You install the Windows software into Crossover and it basically behaves like Mac software after that. Second is installing Windows on a virtual machine, with VirtualBox (free), VMware or Parallels (commercial). Third is Boot Camp.
As far as the drives, I don't know of any limitation on the number of drives you can hook up. I will say that if you are looking to buy enclosures for internal drives, you should look at some Firewire 800 ones since FW 800 is faster for sustained reads and writes than USB 2. Macs are fine with drives formatted with FAT32 but I don't think they will write to NTFS drives without external software. Or you can reformat them with the native Mac filesystem, which is called HFS+. There is a program called Disk Utility which you will find in Applications or just by typing Disk Utility into Spotlight. That is where you look at what filesystems you have mounted, format and partition drives, create disk images, RAIDs, etc.
Congrats on your new toy. Don't be afraid to let Spotlight and Expose do the heavy lifting for you. As a long-time Windows user and neat freak it took me far too long to figure that out.
Oh yeah and Cmd+W makes life so much easier. |
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