Is Apple Mainstage 2 a Disaster

Since I am a guitar player, the enhancements to Mainstage 2 were very welcomed, but there is no way on earth you are getting me to use MainStage 2 live until Apple fixes this Double-MainStage1-Resource-Hog. You have to be able to trust that, while your playing live, everything is rock solid. Your reputation demands it.  What if you were playing in front of a large crowd and BAM!!! MainStage2 shut down. What would you do?

As I am sure you all know, I use Logic Pro and I love it. The upgrades that Logic Pro 9 bring seem great, but I want to focus on my live rig… MainStage (MS2). MainStage comes bundled with Logic Studio. MainStage 2 comes with Logic Studio 9. Of particular interest to me is Amp Designer and PedalBoard. These are great. I mean really great, if you were able to keep MainStage 2 from crashing. I opened up one of their default templates and instantly I get a system overload error. Now I get it just opening MS2. I went to the forums and low-and-behold, there are 4 pages of complaints on just one thread (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2094665&tstart=0).

Ever since I opened MainStage2 it has had nothing but crashes preceded or precluded with Red, maxed out Memory and CPU meters. MainStage 1 uses half to 3/4 the resources MS2 uses. I have tried different concerts and templates, but nothing fixes it.

I used the Bug reporter in the program and, surprisingly, I received a response. Apple asked for a few things, twice, and I sent them. The last communication from Apple I had was on August 7th 2009. I have heard nothing yet.

My advice… Don’t buy Logic Studio 9 until the forums clear up on the issues. One person replied to a thread and said, “I hope you wouldn’t consider using mainstage 2 for live playing until it has had at least one patch”. I guess I stand with the other person on this issue. He said, “Well, I was working under the (mis?)assumption that Main Stage 2 WAS the patch for the original Main Stage!!!”. He’s right, an upgrade SHOULD be, but very seldom is.

As it stands, Mainstage 2 is untrustworthy, but I really want them to fix it so I CAN trust it.

Update: Apple has started deleting comments on the forum that they don’t like… I wonder if this guy knows this comment was deleted too.

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Interesting — I did not realize that Apple is actively censoring messages on these forums and if they don’t like what someone has to say, they are removing messages.  My last message was removed.
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UPDATE  November 22, 2009: Here I did a write up on my mainstage setup:
http://heathmcconnell.com/blog/2009/03/22/personal-live-recording-setups/

I play acoustic guitar and have tried hundreds of things, but nothing has compared to mainstage for my live playing.

I will say, that with mainstage 2, I cannot use my Macbookpro 2.16GHz with 2gb ram, using Amp designer. It crashes all the time. When I use amp designer on my MBP 2.4GHz with 4gb ram I am fine. Never a problem. So I switched the two MBP’s

I use mainstage live for acoustic guitar and Voice and Love it!!!

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