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Tales from the Museum of Unnecessary Purchases: Komplete 9 on OS X 10.6.8

Dear diary,

It’s been a while since my good old Mid-2007 iMac was good for anything. Ever since the “upgrade” to Lion it was on a downhill path, but the Mavericks-upgrade made it unusable to a point where I didn’t even want to use it as a second screen for browsing the web anymore. And Logic 8 and Mavericks really did not want to get a long either… Well, 2 options: Throw it out and buy a new one -or- try and restore it to its former glory. Option 1 had to be abandoned due to a case of acute non-affordability, so I decided to wipe it and install good old 10.6 Snow Leopard on it, the last OS X I remember it running well. So this old iMac was to become my dedicated machine for making music!

INTERMISSION! Yes, just a year or two ago when I had to get a Windows PC for a PC-only work-project I was excited about taking my music-making back to Sonar on the PC, but well… I bought Sonar X2 and after a very painful setup process I did indeed get everything to run with acceptably small latency, but I don’t know what happened – this was nothing like the good old Sonar 2 (?) I remembered and nothing like the good old Cakewalk Pro Audio 8 (?) I used in my parent’s basement. Did someone mess up the interface that bad, or did I simply romanticize it in my memory? In any case, I still have Sonar X2 on there and I’ve come to accept the quiet hum of my desktop PC as the tape-hiss of the 21st century, but I don’t enjoy using it much. It’s simply too much hassle to use. I’d rather focus on the music-making instead.

So back to the Mac I go. Logic 8 is far from perfect, but it does a better job at getting out of the way. I installed OS X 10.6, updated it to 10.6.8, installed Logic 8 and Komplete 5 and everything just works. I can even have custom icons in the Finder-sidebar! Oh good old 10.6.8! Now tell me, am I getting old? Am I starting to reject change instead of embracing it? Am I getting to an age where I’m starting to miss the “good old days”? Or are they really simple ruining OS X more and more with every new version? (I mean Mavericks doesn’t even run all that well on my main work machine, a still-pretty-new Mid-2012 MBP) Whatever. Let’s not get into this again…

Now at long last, let’s get to the topic of this post! When the Native Instruments summer sale came along I took a look at our finances and even though it wasn’t looking too good, I managed to convince myself that it would be a good investment to upgrade to Komplete 9!

After I had pressed the buy button I had a good look around. I looked at the assortment of tablets and phones, the wacom pens, joysticks, gamepads, the kinect, the leap motion, the mini-keyboards, drum-pads, guitars, the boxes full of Kickstarter-rewards, the unplayed and still-wrapped PS3/PS4/Xbox-One games, the old and new game consoles, the 3D-printed experiments, the photo-equipment, the small bust of Socrates on my desk, the e-drumkit, the good old Marshall amp I can’t even use because the neighbors would freak out, the countless hard-disks and chargers and pencils and books and board-games. And then I realized that apparently this was no longer a home office. Somehow over the past few years this had turned into my very own Museum of Unnecessary Purchases. How much happiness does a Yongnuo RF-603C buy? A couple of minutes tops. How about a Zoom H4? Mhm, let’s say 45 mins. But that’s how it is. Money buys happiness. And these days you need quite a lot of money to buy enough happiness for the entire family.

Well, that didn’t quite work. Let me try once more to get to the topic of this post… Komplete 9 arrived. Even though the minimum requirements say OS X 10.7, it installed without problems (over the course of a day – it comes on 12 DVDs) on 10.6.8. (I had done my research on this) Only step left: Open control center, type in my serial number and activate everything. Ouch! Control Center says it require 10.7 to run. So all the products work just fine on 10.6.8, only the stupid flash-app you use to activate the products requires 10.7? *facepalm* Anyway: Deleted the entire Control Center folder, downloaded the last version that ran on 10.6.8 and installed that instead; works!

The dedicated music making machine is a go and I’m sure the 55 additional GB of samples will improve the quality of my music-making significantly, as you might or might not hear in the background of one of my future games. (Not New Orbit Ep2, that upped and died quite publicly on Kickstarter – in case you missed it)

Until next time, when we bring you new tales from the Museum of Unnecessary Purchases! [imagine dramatic exit music here]

 

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