I did the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), and everything is looking and sounding good so far, which is great . . .
Great! 
BACKGROUNDIt has taken over two years of hard work to refine the new and vastly improved system for doing digital music production here in the sound isolation studio, and NOTION 3 is the
foundation for the system, which in simple terms maps to everything originating from music notation done in NOTION 3 . . .
When I start a new song, I begin by doing a NOTION 3 score which typically has chords, rhythm, bass, and occasionally some type of melody, and this first NOTION 3 score is the primal foundation for the song, where I continue to work on it until there is approximately three minutes of verses, choruses, bridges, interludes, or whatever makes sense, and sooner or later the song has a well-defined structure, and this typically maps to perhaps 20 to 25 instrument staves, which is a happy size for a NOTION 3 score when all the instruments are VSTi virtual instruments . . .
The next step involves recording the NOTION 3 generated audio as soundbites in Digital Performer 7 (MOTU) via ReWire (Propellerhead Software), which is important for two reasons, one of which is that 20 to 25 VSTi virtual instruments per score is the practical upper limit for a NOTION 3 score due to the limitations of the 32-bit application workspace and the other of which is that I need to be able to record real electric guitar and singing . . .
To put everything into perspective, discovering all the rules and procedures required to do the "next step" described in the previous paragraph took about six months of diligent work and a good bit of expertise in making sense of patently strange behaviors of vastly complex computer algorithms, which in some respects was a bit easier for me to do, since (a) I have a university degree in Computer Science and (b) I know how to "scout around" toward the goal of solving abstruse and often puzzling computer prolems, but so what . . .
So what! But it is not just a matter of the system working very nicely for music notation, VSTi virtual instuments, real instruments, singing, and all that stuff, because I also discovered how to work with Reason 5 (Propellerhead Software) in a way that allows NOTION 3 scores to be the foundation, where the basic strategy is to export the respective music notation staff as MIDI, which then is imported to Reason 5 to tell the respective Reason 5 instrument what to play, except that the Reason 5 generated audio is recorded as soundbites in Digital Performer 7 via ReWire. NOTION 3 continues to be the foundation, but there is the intermediate manual step of exporting and then importing MIDI, which is fine with me, because (a) it works and (b) it is repeatable, where the "repeatable" aspect is very important, since this is what makes it possible to do revisions to specific instrument parts, where for example if I decide that a note will sound better by raising or lower it, then I make the change to the music notion in the respective NOTION 3 score; export the MIDI from NOTION 3; import the MIDI to Reason 5; and then redo the soundbite in Digital Performer 7 via ReWire, where for reference I use a simple Piano for the music notation in NOTION 3 for the staff that will be exported as MIDI for use in Reason 5, which works nicely because by the time I need to do something in Reason 5 I know enough about the song to do it this way, which is one of the key aspects of doing songs via layering, where the individual parts are done in layers, one instrument part at a time, which for reference is where discovering how to compose using a "play by ear" strategy becomes vastly important, at least here in the sound isolation studio, because I have no idea how a song will develop until I start working on it, which overall makes it an iterative type of activity, where I listen for a while until the next idea appears, since the fact of the matter is that I am hearing the song for the first time, so how am I supposed to know how it should sound, really . . .
"I Want To Dance With You" (The Surf Whammys) -- Basic Rhythm Section -- MP3 (9.5MB, 286-kbps [VBR], approximately 4 minutes and 34 seconds)Really! 
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NOTE: Based on my current understanding of digital music production, there are two general ways to do virtual instruments, where one way involves using VSTi virtual instruments and the other way involves working within the Reason framework. There are variations of the VSTi virtual instruments, but for the most part it is a matter of different formats (for example, Audio Units [AU] on the Mac), but NOTION 3 works with VSTi virtual instruments, which is fine with me. It also is possible to use a MIDI keyboard or MIDI instrument and a computer as a hybrid synthesizer in a "real instrument" configuration, but I consider this basically to be a "real instrument" type of thing, which makes it pretty much the same as playing a lead guitar solo on a real electric guitar or singing a melody and recording it via a microphone and so forth . . . ]
Depending on the complexity of instrumentation and lots of other stuff, it might take several hundred hours to do everything required for a three minute
DISCO or
Pop song, but it takes this much time no matter how it is done, since for example if 10 people--musicians and singers, including an arranger, composer, lyricist, audio engineer, and producer--work on a song 10 hours a day for three days, then this maps to 300 hours of work for one person when you do the arithmetic and consider everything in terms of "person hours" or whatever . . .
STRATEGYWith the requisite background (
see above), it should be obvious that it is very important to preserve the integrity of the new and improved digital music production system, and toward this goal when there is a major operating system upgrade the strategy here in the sound isolation studio is to get a new internal hard drive for the 2.8-GHz 8-core Mac Pro, which is used to create a clone of the current primary internal hard drive using SuperDuper! (Shirt Pocket), where the newly cloned internal hard drive becomes the drive onto which the new version of the operating system is installed . . .
SuperDuper! (Shirt Pocket)The advantage of doing it this way is that if I need to rollback the clock to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), then I can do this in a few minutes by rebooting using the Lion HD internal drive, and if I need to rollback the clock to Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), then I can do a quick internal drive swap and boot to the Snow Leopard HD internal drive, and yet another key aspect of this strategy is that this makes it possible to create a dedicated machine which can be "frozen in time" for purposes of making the complete digital music production system available in a practical way regardless of future hardware and software changes . . .
This is the strategy I used for the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), which cost approximately $180 (US) including the $20 (US) that Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) cost at the Mac App Store, and the new Seagate 3TB 7200 RPM internal drive is peppy, which is a bonus . . .
And as was the case for the upgrade to Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion), the only thing I had to do was to reauthorize Digital Performer 7, which requires inserting the Digital Performer 7 installation CD/DVD and entering the keycode for the license, which takes about five minutes . . .
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NOTE: I was a bit concerned about what would be required to make the iLok for MachFive 3 (MOTU) happy, but it apparently made itself happy, which is fine with me . . . ]
I did a few quick tests with Reason 5, Kontakt 5 (Native Instruments), MachFive 3, Twin 3 (FabFilter Software Instruments), and the various IK Multimedia VSTi virtual instruments and VST effects plugins, as well as the Timeless 2 (FabFilter Software Instruments) echo VST effect plug-in, and everything looks to be working nicely with Mac OS X Core Audio . . .
I need to do some tests with the MOTU 828mk3 Hybrid audio interface, which I will do in a while . . .
And it is important to understand that I did
not install any new software other than the operating system, so my testing does not cover what happens if one starts with a new Apple computer running Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and then installs a bunch of digital music production software, hence the scenario here in the sound isolation studio covers what happens when you already have all the digital music production software and do the operating system upgrade from the current version of Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion) to Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), which is fabulous . . .
Fabulous! 
