So I am using VMWare again – this time to test multiple platforms from my new Vista laptop (I don’t have a lot of love for Vista, at least not yet, but my company needs to test on all kinds of platforms).

 VMWare to the rescue!  I’m running multiple OS’s on one laptop and cutting my costs and testing time in half.

 Love it!

So I have been running VMWare Fusion now for PC duties on my MacBook, and it’s working like a charm.  Loving it.

I also just upgraded my Mac to Leopard – more on that later.

 A couple of new additions to the kit that I forgot to mention:

• Apogee Duet (MAN THIS THING ROCKS)
• Virtual Guitarist 2 (runs on the Mac unlike its predecessors)

I’m also generally not using the US-428 – I just don’t need it.  I did need to install my Virtual Instruments on the Fusion Windows XP install – so I could use them to dump tracks from my PC projects to my Mac projects.  They work just fine, no issues at all.

I also did a lot of research on Firewire devices, Pro Tools, Macs and audio recording and production.  Even though almost everywhere says “Don’t use your ProTools MBOX with anything else on the bus” yada yada, I am having some nice success.

I was running into the issue of simply not having more than a single FW port – I have the LiquidMix, MBOX2 Pro, Duet and a Powercore FW.  Even though Digidesign says don’t use the extra FW port on the MBOX2 for anything while you’re using the MBOX, I was running the Powercore off of it.  The Powercore has three ports on the back, but for some reason I can never get a FW device that’s plugged in to one of them to work right.  I wonder if I don’t have a very early unit that had some issue with these ports.

So – I have a 23″ Cinema Display and I ran the FW off the MacBook to that, giving me two ports (yes this is effectively a hub) – ran the MBOX and Powercore off one port and then the Liquid Mix off the other.  No worries at all!  When the Duet got added into the mix, I was worried I would have to just use it for tracking, then disconnect it for mixdown (the Liquid Mix doesn’t have but one FW port, either – just like the Duet – so they couldn’t be daisy chained).  But!  On a lark I got a Belkin 6 port FW hub (from MicroCenter, in the Mac section) – and believe it or not, I could run all the devices off of it!  No problems at all.

To test the theory, I ran mixes with 20 total externally-driven plugins or more (10 on the LiquidMix, 10 on the Powercore) out through both the MBOX and the Duet, with no problems.  I was actually pretty suprised.  I suspect that if my plugin counts get too high, I will start to see some issues, but right now everything runs smooth as silk.  Chalk me up as a permanent Mac convert, this is amazing.

Now if I could only convince the wife that I needed a new Mac Pro…