From the penthouse suite of the Manhattan Producers Alliance, the view of the Empire State Building is almost perfect. But Alliance members — accomplished composers, producers and sound designers including Steve Horowitz (“Super Size Me”), Rick Baitz (“Vagina Monologues”/HBO) and Stuart Kollmorgen (“JoJo’s Circus”/Disney, “Kenny the Shark”/NBC) — pay little attention.

They’re busy moving between recording studios, composing suites and offices, sharing technical resources such as Power Macs, musical creativity and resources for projects that range from single songs to full scores for television, film, theater and multimedia. Joe Carroll, award-winning composer, songwriter and lyricist who pioneered the groundbreaking cooperative in 2003, agrees that things are “working beautifully.”

So why are Carroll and producer, composer and sound designer Wade Tonken moving all of the Macs from Mac OS 9 — which everyone is happy with — to Mac OS X and Power Mac G5s?

“If somebody records a small band in the main recording studio, after lunch they can work in another room that has the same horsepower and capabilities but maybe is a quarter of the size. Centralizing resources with Mac OS X, Xsan and Xserve RAIDs allows this.”

In a conversation with Carroll, Tonken and national commercial advertising legend Kevin Joy, we talked about technology and creativity, the move to Mac OS X, what it means for Alliance members, and the strategy they’re taking to get there.

Why the move to Mac OS X?

Carroll: We want our facilities to work the way a video house or a filmmaking facility does, where all the studio resources are totally centralized. If somebody records a small band in the main recording studio, after lunch they can work in another room that has the same horsepower and capabilities but maybe is a quarter of the size. Centralizing resources with Mac OS X, Xsan and Xserve RAIDs allows this.

Tonken: That’s why we’re excited about having Mac OS X, G5’s, Xserve RAIDs and Xsan software. Whenever we’re not doing live playing, we’re using gigantic sample libraries, and they’re getting larger and larger.

When you have multiple composers with multiple libraries and multiple rooms, people get stuck. One room has less resources. One room has the gigastudio. Another room has the Vienna library, but maybe they’re in the middle of a vocal session and I can’t get in there until this afternoon.

Now, with the Xserve and Xsan, these libraries will be on a centralized server. The audio will stream over Fiber Channel; the data, the control will stream over Ethernet. And because we’re dealing with G5s and RAIDed audio streaming over Fiber, there’s a huge capacity increase.

Whatever room you go into here, you have access to exactly what you had in any other room. And it will be wonderful for workflow.

So all the Macs will have the same resources?

Carroll: The thing in our current environment that’s a killer, and that Wade was talking about, is the workflow compatibility between person to person and system to system.

We’re constantly trying to synchronize resources room to room. Some piece of technology or some sample set advances on one system. We have to get that on every system in all the rooms. The only way to do it is to try and keep track of what’s where and reconcile them. And it’s a losing proposition.

That’s the thing that we’re looking for Xsan to solve.

What’s your biggest challenge moving to Mac OS X?

Tonken: Having to bring up 26 episodes of a show done in Mac OS 9 on a fully expanded Mix Plus TDM system. What do you do with last year’s job?

Carroll: We have a composer here in season three of a show. How is he going to commit to Mac OS X without spending six months pulling over cues and making them available to manipulate for the show?

Next page: Facilitating Creativity