XO Wavers,

I got an e-mail from someone who really wanted to try XO Wave, but
was stuck with OS X 10.3, because of some older hardware he had. (I have
heard of other people being stuck with 10.3 because of some QuickTime
issues). XO Wave CAN be run on OS X 10.3, but there are some problems,
and it is not a supported platform, so you have to realize when you try
to use XO Wave on OS 10.3, you won't get official support. Still, lots
of people want to do professional CD Mastering on OS X, and there aren't
many alternatives to XO Wave, so here's some info on using XO Wave on OS X
10.3:


Why 10.3 will probably never be supported:

XO Wave was originally developed on Linux and FreeBSD. I bought a cheap
used mac and installed OS 10.3, and tried working with it. Unfortunately,
I found a number of problems with their Java engine which, for a while,
really slowed down development. When OS 10.4 and Java 1.4.2 came out, many
of the problems went away. Since I had already spent a long time with 10.3
and really never got it to work, it's not likely that something I do will
make it work now. It is possible that apple will port Java 1.4.2 to OS
10.3, which would probably fix the problem, but my impression is that
Apple really wants us all to upgrade to 10.4, rather than fix the problem,
so I wouldn't count on it.


What issues you will have on 10.3:

The biggest problem with OS X 10.3 is this: sometimes, often from the
moment you start the program, the menus (along with all associated
keyboard shortcuts) become completely non-functional. The worst part is
that they are not all greyed out, so you might think you saved a file,
even when you didn't.

The Workaround:

One user suggested the following work-around:
+As soon as XO Wave opens, goto XO Wave:Preferences.
+In the preferences window, select "Show Advanced settings"
+then select appearance and change the look and feel to something else,
like "Plastic".
+click "OK"

This doesn't always work, of course, because you need the menu system to
get to preferences. So you can either try starting XO Wave a few times
until you can poen the prefs window, or you can use this more complex
alternative:

Open the terminal program and start a new terminal. Type this command to
delete your existing preferences:

rm ~/.xowave/settings.2.props

Then, run the following two commands to set the look and feel to something
else in the default preferences:

echo "Appearance_Look_and_Feel=com.jgoodies.plaf.plastic.PlasticLookAndFeel" >
~/.xowave/settings.2.props
echo "Appearance_Theme=javax.swing.plaf.metal.DefaultMetalTheme" >>
~/.xowave/settings.2.props



At this point, XO Wave will look a little weird, because you'll have the
menu-bars appearing in the windows rather than at the top of the screen,
and you'll have a generally un mac-like look and feel, but most features
will probably work. Keep in mind that by doing this you'll be waiving you
right to official support, both because you are running OS X 10.3 and
because using alternate look and feels is unsupported.

best of luck!

bjorn

-------------
Bjorn Roche
Check out my CD Mastering Software
for Mac OS X : http://www.xowave.com