New MacPro for Gareth Williams at Human LA
With offices in Los Angeles, New York and Paris, the creative team at Human World Wide is busy composing original music and sound design for advertising, television, film and interactive media. Human’s impressive list of clients include Apple, Sony, Nike, Coke Cola, Adidas, Google, Delta Airlines, Sony, Audi, Microsoft Xbox, and many more.
While the main Human office is in New York, the LA office relies on Audio Perception for technical support to keep their composers and studios up and running. We also provide comprehensive data backup, with off-site rotation. Composer and Co-Founder Gareth Williams was ready to upgrade to the newly redesigned 2013 Apple MacPro 12 Core computer. Gareth is one of the many, extremely busy composers at Human, and we needed to make the migration to the new MacPro as quick and trouble-free as possible. Audio Perception and Jim Weisbin, the head tech at the Human New York office, proceeded with careful and thorough planning prior to the big upgrade and migration. It was decided to keep the current MacPro running as-is, as a guest composer rig. For the system drive, we planned to use the Apple Migration Assistant to populate the new MacPro system drive with all relevant data from the MacPro5,1 system drive. For the two internal sound content drives, new drives were purchased and all data cloned. The project drive was just moved into the setup. To house all the data that was internal on the old MacPro, we utilized a 4 bay JBOD SATA Thunderbolt enclosure. For audio, we wanted to continue using Gareth’s existing Apogee AD16X and DA16X interfaces, so the Apogee Thunderbridge was chosen, which provides the same connections as the Symphony 64 card in the old MacPro5,1.
The data migration went smoothly, with all of Gareth’s data, including software and audio instrument plugins, Logic Pro X, and many other applications, populating the new MacPro. Aside from a few authorizations, etc., everything came across and worked. We did have to install some updated/new drivers here and there.
With all the necessary data copied to new drives, and the system drive data migration complete, the new MacPro is up and running with the Thunderbridge/Apogee hardware. When running Logic Pro X on Gareth’s new MacPro, the increase in system performance over the previous MacPro5,1 is quite noticeable.
All in all, the upgrade went smoothly over a weekend, and Gareth was back up and running for his Monday morning start.