Hi folks,

I’ve opened up two new forums on the site today. The first is one for Sibelius notation program. We’ve had enough notation questions over the years to warrant the forum. It also helps that I’m a long-time Sibelius trainer and can facilitate helping out. Now that Pro Tools has Sibelius capability built-in, this move seems very timely given the number of Pro Tools users we have here at Mac OS X Audio.

I’ve also added a forum for Final Cut Pro. Many of us audio folks need to dabble in video at one time or another. Some of us do more than dabble. It’s always interesting to see just how different an audio person looks at a timeline vs a video person. This forum will be a place for all of us to discuss using Final Cut Pro. As I’ve gained some amazing FCP experience in the last year, I’m going to start as a moderator. Clearly, FCP is a big app and my gut tells me that there are other experts here. If you feel you can help out, please private message me. We’ll start out with the FCP app as the focus, and see how many questions come from the Final Cut Studio before we evaluate any sub forums.

As you can tell, we’re really looking to grow the forums. Got ideas for expansion? We’re all ears! 

Marc Schonbrun

The forums are back online! Check them out here.

We’re happy to have them back, with 100% of the data intact. We’ll revamp the look and feel soon.

Thanks for your continued patience!

If you’re seeing this, the bigbluelounge.com has served its last visitor. Don’t despair! What you’re reading is the new home of what was Big Blue Lounge (formerly OS X Audio). Welcome to Mac OS X Audio.com! In preparation for the move to the new servers and new domain, the forum has been taken down to facilitate one final backup and transfer of the database. As soon as the forum is online, you’ll read about it on this page. As many of you may remember, OS X Audio.com was founded by Tony David Cray (tdc). It was the first dedicated site for making music on the then brand new OS X. Over the years, OS X itself changed to a more open platform, capable of running Windows and Linux to appeal to a broader range of musicians. Mac OS X Audio.com will serve your home for making music on a Mac, no matter how you do it.

When the original OS X Audio.com was launched, it featured a front page full of news articles. Back when Tony started the site, coding those articles was very time consuming. The net has changed so much since then, and WordPress (which is powering this site) is making writing articles a snap. A few months ago, Tony asked Kevin Anker (kanker) and I to take over the site. Tony is in charge of the Sydney Opera House’s audio department—a job that takes up all of his time and then some. Tony has recently been recognized with a Grammy award for his work at the Opera House and it’s an award that this community is so very proud of.  When Tony asked Kevin and me to take over management of the site, we didn’t hesitate. We love the community and want to  take it to the next step. The first step was to move it to our own servers and take on the fiscal responsibility of hosting. First on Kevin and my agenda was to put up a new front page/article system. Both Kevin and I have written extensively about pro audio on the Mac and we’re passionate about bringing interesting stories to this community. To help with this, we’ve recruited Orren Merton, another veteran pro audio writer who’s a close friend of both Kevin and mine.

Kevin, Orren and I will start the flow of articles flowing. We’ll be looking to do a whole lot more than just announcing products. The forums will start off largely the same way they were. We might even have the banners fixed The same dedicated crew of moderators and the same forums will make you feel right at home. Even Putte will be there!  We hope to keep expanding the forums with new places for manafacturers to host their own forums like we’ve done with Redmatica and Metric Halo. The forums have always been unique. The signal to noise ratio here has always been exceptional. That’s something we’re all really proud of. We hope to greatly expand this site over the coming months and years. We even have RSS now—welcome to the 21st century…

I hope you’re as excited as we are about these new changes. When the forum goes back online, you’ll read it here in a news story. Until then, keep busy creating and start dreaming. What do you want this community to be? It’s always been about the community. Tony did a great job of staying out of the way and letting things ebb and flow their own way. Kevin and I won’t mess with success in that regard. So, keep your brain focused on what you want to see here. In due course, we’ll be opening up the article writing to other talented members of this community to help expand the breadth of the site. Got ideas for some great articles? Contact us!

Until then, thanks for your patience in getting this site back to state of the art.

Marc Schonbrun and Kevin Anker

Owners, Mac OS X Audio.com

P.S. We’ve gotten a few questions about logins and the old site. As far as we can tell, when we import the old database, everything is retained. So for now, just wait and see—we’re all learning!