Odds and Ends: McDonald's, Sony music promotion not Mac compatible; Performance problems with new release of MachFive

McDonald's, Sony music promotion not Mac compatible Sony and McDonald's have teamed for a promotion -- similar to the Apple/Pepsi campaign -- that allows Big Mac purchasers to redeem special codes for downloadable music from the Sony Connect store. Unfortunately, the service is not yet Mac OS X compatible.

MacFixIt reader Dale writes "If you haven't tried it out, these are the instructions on the side of a Big Mac package: go to www.connect.com; complete the registration process and download the necessary software; etc.

"What it doesn't say is that it is Windows only. And having checked with a few people on IRC, apparently US only"

Performance problems with new release of MachFive MacFixIt reader Michael Mortilla reports some performance issues with the new release of MOTU's MachFive sound sampling tool:

"The 'streaming' update not only slows performance of MachFive to a crawl when loading, but takes over the entire system (Mac OS X 10.3.4) so that you can't force quit from the dock! You can force quit by using the CMD>OPT>ESC keys. I lost access to everything on my Mac (running programs, Finder, etc.) while MachFive was 'loading.' :et me be more specific... loading the bank of sound was fast as always, but selecting an instrument takes WAY too long.

"Loading even a small sample takes a very long time. A large sample probably will be unusually long to load, especially on the fly. It just ain't gonna happen. Also, the program shows all 16 channels as "working."

"MOTU has not offered a link to download the earlier version (1.08) so if you want to go back, you should have saved the earlier version to disk. Fortunately, I did and simply ran the installer and all is well again. But I won't be using 1.12 any time soon"

If you are having similar issues, please drop us a line at late-breakers@macfixit.com.

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