No Audiostrobe Programming for Mac/OSX?

[dbit]

So, insofar as I can tell, am I correct that there are no audiostrobe capable programming environments for Mac/OSX? I know some one has a vat plug-in for audiostrobe but this is Windows only as well.

[synaesthesia]

Can't you run a Windows emulator on your Mac? Failing that you can get good PC notebooks these days for $500.

[dbit]

I was going to say, without running emulation. Most emulation requires you to wipe and reformat the drive, plus I have precious little space in a lean audio/3d production machine, I'm not too keen on bloating it down with a windows file system.

[Andy]

Not true. I don't have a Mac, but know many people who do. They use Parallels or VMWare and no reformatting is needed. I don't know that it's even needed for Bootcamp.

I'm sure Neuroasis can tell you more as he runs Windows on his Mac.

Also, you can get new netbooks for $250 or less.

[neuroasis]

There are not any native tools that have been released for Mac OS X designed specifically to create AudioStrobe. I have created some Audio Unit plugins that I use which are not quite ready to let into the wild. They work fine for me but I know their quirks. They might be released at some point. There are some binaural beat programs and Audacity can create binaurals or isochronic tones with plugins.

AudioStrobe can be created with any audio sequencer using a 19.2kHz tone. The left and right sides of the stereo image determine which light color is active and how bright it is. You must have a pretty good grasp of audio creation. I suppose if there is enough interest I could create some tutorials.

As far as Windows on a Mac, Andy is right. If you use Parallels or VMWare Fusion you will not have to reformat your drive. Reformatting is only required for Boot Camp partitions. A base Windows 7 install takes about 1.5GB of space. It is not really bloated as all the Windows files are contained in a drive image. You can share your existing Mac folders and their files for maximum integration. I would recommend this approach to any Mac user as it is inexpensive, easy to maintain and suitably fast for most purposes. Most modern hardware is supported as well.

The best tools are available for Windows only and it looks like that this will be the case for the foreseeable future.

[dbit]

Thanks for the info everybody! Looks like my view of windows virtualization was out of date. I saw how they were suggested to be used when boot camp first came out and just decided I wasn't interested. When I get some free time in the next couple weeks looks like I'll be trying to install parallels + xp on my external drive. I'd still like to keep this stuff separate. I'm actually thinking about buying a small drive that will just be my 'windows' system and drive.

I'm assuming XP should be ok for a lot of the software out there? Any suggestions on this?

[synaesthesia]

Why not use the current Windows 7 ? If I jumped on a Mac I would not want to use a 10 year old Mac operating system.

[dbit]

I suppose this makes sense. A lot of studio people I know still use XP for backwards compatibility/stability issues. I'm so out of the loop on Windoze stuffs! Thanks again for the help. So is Neuro-Programmer 3 kind of the new standard for programming these kinds of audiostrobe sessions? Can someone give me a rundown of the main options out there?

[synaesthesia]

Love the way Apple fanboys always have to sneak in the word 'Windoze' somewhere. ( Ah, gives me the opportunity to say `fanboy' ) :-)

[dbit]

Haha. Hey, it just slides out, it's part of my nature! I think fanboy is as bad as windoze, so we're even!