ExNotator

I listened to the song in question by 'Spirit' on YouTube and was somewhat surprised at the similarities. Led Zeppelin actually toured with the band in their early days. Surprisingly Mr. Page went on record in 1988 saying: "Obviously it can get to the point where it gets past being a compliment, and it can be rather annoying, when you've got things like Kingdom Come, actually ripping riffs right off, that's a different thing altogether." - Led Zeppelin's guitarist and producer Jimmy Page

Wait...I thought I was in a forum where you are supposed to 'base statements on your own habits and just make assumptions'. It's called an exchange of ideas. I didn't quite follow your train of thought but the 'frankenstein'd beast' terminology catched my eyes. Actually 'frankenstein'd Beats' might be a little catchier...but that is just an assumption of mine.

The amount of money that is being offered makes me wonder if Apple is more interested in the streaming business of Beats than the actual headphones. The headphones are poplar but not that innovative. Sales in the iTunes store have been on the decline in the last few years and Apple's own streaming radio is not as popular as Pandora and the likes.

To be fair MasterWriter made some waves with version 1.0 because it was the first rhyming dictionary that could find slant rhymes. It just hasn’t been properly cultivated over the years and looks rather underwhelming next to more modern efforts like Rhyme Genie. I always wondered if the purchase price of MasterWriter is so high because they have to pay royalties to the artists for endorsing their product. Either way the real question is how you will get your songs out of MasterWriter 3 if you ever decide to cancel your subscription.

A few years ago Disk Warrior still came on a DVD so you can boot from it to repair a hard drive. Another option is to create a small rescue partition on a USB drive with Disk Warrior (and Disk Utility). OS X 10.6 is definitely supported. At least I was successful a few times with it whenever I had some issues. Good luck!

There is nothing wrong with sticking with software that you know. I sometimes still fire up my Atari to run the good old Notator SL before it morphed into Logic Audio and it’s still a whole lot of fun. At least with MasterWriter 2 you still have the option to export your work. I certainly appreciate the MIDI export feature of Notator SL…

If you have all the files on a backup drive I would use this opportunity to reformat the crashed drive and do a clean install. A reformat of the hard drive will disable any bad blocks immediately so there is a better chance that your drive will still work trouble free. I always have a complete clone of my hard drive handy that I maintain with SuperDuper!...if you have a clone you can simply boot from it to fix an ailing drive and re-install the entire OSX with one mouse click if necessary. This way you can also use the Disk Utility that is located in your OSX utilities folder of your cloned hard drive since it was updated for your specific OSX. Either way these things happen from time to time and it's never clear what exactly causes it. Sometimes it's an aging hard drive that needs to be replaced.

That sound like a classic hard drive meltdown.Try repairing the hard drive with DiskWarrior. On OSX 10.6.8 DiskWarrior usually does a mighty fine job in bringing crashed hard drives back to life. Just have an external drive ready to salvage your existing files when the faulty drive has been restored.

FYI there are a few brave souls who actually managed to install Rosetta on OSX 10.7 to run Logic Audio 8. They reported that once Rosetta is installed Logic Audio 8 runs without any issues. But do stick with OSX 10.6.8 since it is better suitable for pro audio work than OSX 10.7.

No [...] As it is, writers get 50% and publishers get 50%. [...] Unless your producer actually wrote the entire composition and is actually the one publishing the work I would just stick to a producer credit and pay him his flat fee. I'm with Blue Monkey on this one. What the OP describes is a standard production job and the producer should not get a percentage of the writer nor the publisher share of the song. Not to make it any more confusing but the publisher and writer share of a song are calculated as two different entities. A songwriter can have 100% of the writer share and 25% of the publishing share while the publisher receives the remaining 75% of the publishing share. If your producer helps you get a deal with a record company/publisher he will ask for a share of the publishing portion. Otherwise he is usually compensated hourly and may also earn points based on the number of records sold.

The only utility you need in this space is the free but excellent OnyX. It will allow you to clean caches and do important maintenance routines. With OnyX and the Disk Utility app in your 'Utilities' folder you can do 95% percent of what CleanMyMac/MacKeeper can do. The remaining 5% does more harm than good.

MasterWriter 3 seems like a subscription based web clone of version 2. Subscription based software can be a slippery slope. I would recommend taking a look at the Rhyme Genie/TuneSmith combo in this particular software space…a lot more horse power for a lot less silver.

Transcribe is a great software in this area. Another option is the little less pricey Capo app by SuperMegaUltraGroovy. You can easily adjust the speed to your liking. Another classic app is the Amazing Slow Downer by Roni Music. It offers a pretty good built in EQ to make it easier to concentrate on a certain instrument in your orchestral piece.

I would also recommend the iMac 27". I bought the 'latest' Mac Mini last year since I still wanted to use beloved 30" Cinema Display. It serves me well, however, the Mini is due for a major refresh. The iMac is faster and has a great display built in if you don't mind the highly reflective glass. 27" is plenty of screen real estate.

Wow! This is great. Thanks so much.