Running Musink on Mac

A common question asked is “Can I install Musink on OSX?”. The short answer to this question is “No”. Musink is Windows-based software, though plans are in play to get it working on Mac. Until then, of course, you can run Windows on your Mac or use Parallels Desktop.

There are various programs avaliable which will run Windows on a Mac, allowing you to use Musink. These include:

  1. VirtualBox (Free!)
  2. Bootcamp (ships with OSX 10.5 and later)
  3. Parallels Desktop
  4. VMWare Fusion

The listed software require a Windows installation disk iso image. Free trial versions of Windows are avaliable from Microsoft. These trials typically last for 3 to 4 months. Musink is commonly run in VirtualBox without issues.

Wine is a software package which lets OSX install and run some Windows applications. Wine does not support several features required by Musink, and is so unlikely to run Musink.

If your primary motivation for using Musink is to create audible music (midi, wav files, MP3s) but your virtual instruments and processing software reside on a Mac OS, remember the following:

  1. Most virtual instruments have dual-OS support
  2. You can write MIDI files in Musink in Windows, and then safely import those MIDI files into other software on a Mac. The time you save writing in Musink may well be worth the few seconds spent emailing the MIDI file between computers.

Writing an application is no mean feat; testing alone often takes weeks or months per release. As such, a choice had to be made between a substantially more stable and feature-rich Windows program, or a program that ran on all operating systems. Unstable and under-developed programs are not particularly useful to anybody, regardless of their OS.