SHN on Mac

[jimfisheye]

It's 2018 now! It represents very poor bang for buck. I ruled it out on those grounds when I was buying a new Mac a couple of years ago. Also, if I recall correctly some people were disappointed with the expansion options back in 2013, and again that technology has changed a lot since then.

I personally think the new multi-core Mac Minis look promising, but that's from a software development point of view rather than a heavy-duty media content creation point of view. And I've been really frustrated by how Macs handle video these days. Half the time they refuse to wake up all the monitors. Because modern video connections have smarts at both ends, there are now too many ways for things to fail. Dunno what the state of play is like on other platforms. Linux used to be pretty dreadful at video, TBH (mainly due to ideological opposition to closed source video drivers).

As for that 2012 model 'cylinder' Mac Pro...
Pros: It had thunderbolt. So if you decided to go with thunderbolt connecting accessories because you wanted to pay 3 times as much for the same equipment and performance, you're good here.

Cons: Not upgradable anything. No drive bays. You can actually upgrade the CPUs in the 2009/2010 'real' Mac Pro models to 4.something GHz 6 core (for a total 12 core machine) and it will run rings around the cylinder model.

[jimfisheye]

Understood, but I'm asking in the context of Jim's observation that 2010-2012 models offer good bang/buck, and wondering if there's a reason to not get a 2013 if the opportunity arises. I'm told that a 2010-2012 Mac Pro would need a new video card to be able to run recent versions of OS X, for example, so that's a demerit for that model.

In other words, let's say that, hypothetically, I were in a position to be given a 2010-2012 model or a 2013 model. (Let's also say that I can't afford to buy a new Mac Pro myself; neither of those statements are really hypothetical.) Is there a reason to turn down the 2013 in favor of the earlier model?

BTW you're talking to someone who's still using a 2010 MacBook Pro (with a flaky GPU!) and running Snow Leopard most of the time. I don't love being behind the curve, but then again given what Apple has become, I do like refusing to participate in their recent world of headphone dongles and broken promises...

I certainly wouldn't turn down a free 2013 Mac Pro!

But if I was buying... I'd buy the better more powerful and more full featured machine: A 2009 or 2012 Mac Pro.

Apple had an interesting product line that was way ahead of the curve there for a good while. So much so that it still wipes the floor with their new direction even though these machines are a few years old now. Strange times I guess. You have to pay 4x for a new machine with similar spec that will be outlasted by that older model. Oh, and the old models have literally every port. This new USB-C/thunderbolt3 port... How many USB-C accessories do you have? The poor thing will look like a Microsoft dongle fest when you're through!

PS. If you got one of the 2011 MBP machines with the flawed 2nd graphics card from AMD, there's a permanent fix. You can simply disable that 2nd card. The 1st GPU supports the full resolution of the built-in display. (A very small handful of 2010 machines ended up with one of these and an even smaller number of 2012 machines as well.)

[laconcombremasque]

I've used Cog for the past several years on my MacBook to play old SHN files, but it seems that this program is either decommisioned or no longer compatible with the latest version of OSX. Any recommendations for another program that can play SHN without converting them to WAV first??

I know this thread is somewhat old, but in case a search about "shn on mac" leads you here, I feel I should mention this free software named xACT :

xACT stands for X Audio Compression Toolkit, an application that encodes and decodes FLAC, SHN, Monkey’s Audio, TTA, Wavpack, and Apple Lossless files. It also can encode these formats to MP3, AAC, or Opus, and do various other utility functions, in addition to a full set of shntool functions. Under the hood, xACT is a GUI based front end for the unix applications Shorten (3.6.1), shntool (3.0.10), Monkey's Audio Compressor (3.99), flac (1.3.2), wavpack (4.70.0), TTA (3.4.1), Opus (libopus 1.1), cdda2wav 3.0 (with paranoia support), LAME (3.100), and aacplusenc (0.17.5). It also uses SoX ( 14.3.2), AtomicParsley (0.9.6), TagLib (1.9.1), MP4v2 (2.0.0), and rsync (3.1.3_31). It executes the basic commands of these applications and adds other features to speed up productivity in creation/use of etree.org standard filesets.

It is not a music player, but can be very useful for converting between these different formats, including less supported ones on Mac like SHN and APE.

free download here : http://xact.scottcbrown.org/