Re: audio editor

[Mehmet-Ali Gulbol <mag@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 7, 2005, at 16:02 , beaucham wrote:

> the Wavesurfer sound file editor. It looks like to me that my
> easiest solution, for a lot of things, is to upgrade my OS to
> 10.3 or 10.4.

I don't know what your hardware is, but I'm almost sure you won't
regret it !
There have been steady improvements on Mac OS X that make it work
faster and more reliably even on older hardware (I've used 10.1,
10.2, 10.3 and 10.4 on the same machine). But maybe you should check
that you won't need some wizardry to be able to install 10.3 or 10.4
on your system. Some machines have been "obsolated" with the releases
of 10.3 and 10.4 (although one can install them anyway and they'll
work well on those machines, they won't be "supported", whatever that
means...).
To simplify things, 10.3 won't install (without fiddling) on machines
without USB, and 10.4 won't install on machines without FireWire.

> my life. (However, I'm not looking forward to the obsolescence
> of all my software after Apple switches over to the Intel chip
> software next year.)

As I understand it, most current software should run on Intel Macs,
albeit slower (they say 30% slower at most).

> By the way, I poked around under the WaveSurfer-1.8.3 directory
> and found two executables, Tcl and Tk. Deeper down in the
> directory structure I found a lot of files with .tcl extensions.
> This seems to be some sort of scripting language, and the whole
> organization of the WaveSurfer-1.8.3 directory lays open how the
> program was developed. Quite a complicated affair! The Linux
> version, on the other hand, comes as a single compact executable,
> so "what you can't see doesn't hurt you".

> Do you have any idea why the programmers would make Wavesurfer
> available in this complex open structure for Mac OS X but just
> as a simple opaque (but easy to use) binary executable for Linux?

Actually, what you see about WaveSurfer is only the case on older Mac
OSes. On 10.3 & 10.4, WaveSurfer also _appears_ (and this is quite
important) as one simple file.
But if you right click (or CTRL-click if you use a 1-button mouse) on
most executables under Mac OS X, there will be an option to "Show
package contents". If you do that, you will see the hidden directory
structure that constitutes the program (what is readily apparent for
WaveSurfer on 10.1). That is how I could find (on 10.4 here) that
WaveSurfer relies on Tcl/Tk.
The .app extension is just a wrapper to simplify the life of users
(as is the case for WaveSurfer under Linux, I presume): they only see
one file, but in reality, there can be a whole lot of directories
hidden inside.
Another way to look at this hidden structure it is to open the
Terminal and navigate into the /Applications folder ('cd /
Applications'). If you list what's inside (like for example with the
command 'ls -la'), most applications will appear as folders that you
can browse into.

So, basically, what you see under 10.1 for WaveSurfer is unintended,
although it is "the reality" of most programs, whether they reside
under 10.1 or newer Mac OSes.

Hope this clears things a bit,

best regards,
Mehmet.