My Piano Problem

To continue the introduction, I'm also a recreational piano player. I love playing the piano, and I use my Mac to do it. I have a nice USB MIDI keyboard, with 88 weighted keys, and I plug it into my Mac, and use two nice pieces of software to play it. One is GarageBand, and the other is a lovely piano application that I found in the Mac App Store. Neither works on Windows, of course.

Today I had my first success. I found a product called Mixcraft, from a company called Acoustica. They make what seems to be the closest thing to GarageBand for Windows. I plugged it into my PC (oh yeah, I do have a PC laptop that I picked up refurbished on Woot a few weeks ago). It worked right out of the box with my keyboard. The latency was not good, but the website had some instructions on how you can tweak the buffer settings to get the right balance between quality and latency. I was also happily surprised to see the abundance of really nice sounds that the software has built in. And the price tag is nice too. You can demo it, but it only costs $79 or so to buy it. So this crisis was averted. The piano sound is not quite as nice, but this will tide me over for now, and I might end up liking this better, because it supports VST instruments, which GarageBand does not. So that means I can eventually buy the nicest software piano available -- particularly when I get the work laptop, which is sure to have smokin' hardware specs.

Now it's time for me to work on the second challenge... reading an HFS+ drive from Windows.