Amazon.com sent me an email yesterday, informing me that Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is available for pre-order. Because I have more than one Mac, I’m of course interested in the family pack for up to five computers. When I visited the page on Amazon, I was surprised to see what customers bought after visiting that page:

That looks very suspicious… My first thought was that Microsoft might be behind that, doing some “optimization” behind Amazon’s back. Just to be sure that it was not just a fluke, I visited the site again today, and the numbers are still the same.

I finally got a chance to test the GarageBand 4.1.2 update that was released last week in regards to the bug I discovered back when the Magic GarageBand feature was first released.

Just to recap: When the Magic feature was used with the Music/GarageBand directory on a different physical disk than the /Library folder, I ended up with a bunch of cryptic error messages and an empty project.

The problem is finally fixed: I was able to create a Magic GarageBand project on my liked Music directory. I guess Apple is telling me to pick up my guitar again…

We finally have a version of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (why did they have to add this to the Photoshop product family – it’s one word more than I want to type…) that is compatible with Apple’s Leopard operating system. Adobe’s Tom Hogarty wrote a blog article about the new version and it’s features. Tom also added some information about known problems of that version. Adobe also treated us to the first release of the Lightroom Export SDK. One part of that SDK is a sample plug-in for export to Flickr  - I tried it, and it works. Jeffrey Friedl has some information about the SDK on his blog:

Lightroom 1.3 & Export Plugins for SmugMug and Zenfolio

How to Install a Lightroom Export Plugin

On the same day, Apple released an update to Leopard – we are now up to version 10.5.1.

Adobe’s Tom Hogarty posted an article about Lightroom 1.2. and Leopard. There are known problems and workarounds, and he lists the ones they know about. This is what I expected then to do for all their applications, and not just a “wait ’til January”…

It was no secret… The Leopard got released into the wild last night (yes, I did get my T-shirt at the Apple store in Rochester, NY). There was a deluge of announcements over the last few days about Leopard compatibility of all sorts of software packages. It looks like most software companies were busy updating their packages to make them run under the new OS. There were a view “not quite done yet” – the most surprising from Apple about FileMaker, but in general, it’s looking good. The developers had access to prerelease builds over the last few months, so I kind of expected this.

I’m however not too happy with the news from Adobe: According to the PDF file they released yesterday, Acrobat “Requires update to 8.1.2 for full compatibility.
Expected to be available in English, French, German, and Japanese in late January 2008. Additional languages expected shortly thereafter.”

January??? You got to be kidding. Why are the other CS3 applications (at least the ones I care about) Leopard compatible, but Acrobat is not?

It would have been nice to at least have a list of what is working and what not. All I know is that Acrobat does come up.  The Adobe PDF printer did however not survive the upgrade to Leopard. I suspect that that’s the only problem. The rest of Acrobat is “just software”, the Adobe PDF printer does interface with the print subsystem, and is therefore more dependent on the operating system. I guess I have to wait…

… but still no fix for my problem.

See my original writeup for some background information.

I finally got an email response from an AppleCare Product Specialist. Unfortunately, the response was not very helpful: It looks like they are now ignoring my original problem and are spending too much time on my question about a workaround. They still have not acknowledged that this is a bug in GarageBand.

After I figured out what causes the problem (linking the GarageBand folder to a different hard disk), I asked if there was a mechanism to configure GarageBand with a different default folder. They told me that this is not possible and “So there is no fix for this and it is normal behavior.”

I have a hard time to accept that this is “normal behavior” – storing your data on a non-startup disk is something I’ve done for years (decades?) and even though it may not be a standard configuration, if every other feature of GarageBand works with my environment, Magic GarageBand should work as well.

Let’s just assume that this is another case of a “Product Specialist” filtering out too much information when relaying this information to an engineer.

I know that the new iLife ‘08 GarageBand Magic feature is not a substitute for Band in a Box (or the Windows version), but it would be an easy way to make my (rare) guitar practice sessions more interesting. So, imagine my surprise when I just ended up with a bunch of error messages like this one ‘Audio file “Original Bass#3.caf” not found.’, with the option to skip or to search (which of course does not find anything) …

… and a few minutes of silence in the resulting projects:

So, it looked like a major new feature of GarageBand was not working, therefore it should be fairly easy to find out why and what to do about it by googling for this problem… Wrong, it turns out that almost nobody is having this problem. I found one thread on Apple’s support site with a workaround, but I hate to copy files without understanding why and what the impact would be. I have Apple Care protection for my Mac Pro, so let’s give Apple a call… After 79 minutes on the phone with them, I figured out what’s causing this problem, and then I tried to convince them that it’s indeed a genuine bug in the software. While talking to them, I tried a few things on my system, and slowly developed a theory, and verified it:

My system is setup with the original startup disk that stores all applications, but I added three more disks, which I’m running in a RAID configuration to store all data files. To make this work, I am using links in my home directory to link directories like Movies, Music or Pictures to their actual storage location on the second disk. This works with all applications that make use of these files (e.g. Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie – the old one, haven’t tried the new version yet – or iDisk). GarageBand also works, as long as I’m not using the new Magic feature.

Magic GarageBand saves the new project to it’s default location, which is the user’s Music/GarageBand directory. The user has no control over that. While it’s saving the project, it needs to access the .caf files, which contain the instrument tracks. These files are stored in the individual directories in /Library/Application Support/Garage/Band/Magic GarageBand. It looks like it can only find these files if the Music/GarageBand directory is on the same disk as the /Library directory (meaning, the startup disk).

A Unix link (or to be more accurate, a soft link in this case) should be should be transparent to an application. The operating system takes care of opening the files, regardless of how they are referenced. GarageBand seems to be different – it looks like it is using the storage location to generate the path to it’s configuration and data files (potentially by creating a relative path starting from the project directory). I tried to capture what GarageBand does in ktrace, but I was not able to extract anything useful (that’s mainly because this was the first time I ever used ktrace). Both people from Apple support that I talked to had no idea what a Unix link was.

Because all other features of GarageBand work with my setup, I’m labeling this behavior as a bug. So far I don’t have a workaround besides putting my Music directory back on my startup disk, and linking some of the subdirectories (e.g. Pictures and Movies) to my RAID system.

Let’s see if Apple can come up with something (or a fix in the next release).