“Kerris says: ‘On the 40 Licks tour, which is where it started, they’d record every single show. They’ve done that for years, but what they’d do with the Licks tour, they would actually record it to a laptop. If you look at any of the old videos from that tour you’ll see a laptop, a Mac laptop sitting behind Charlie, everything’s recorded with these two stereo mics, so they have a rough, they have a full 48-track underneath, but everything goes into that laptop. Everything’s connected to a little distribution amp with five Firewire cables hanging off of it. So while the band was doing their bows and the fireworks were going at the very end, the backline crew would plug in their iPods, synchronize the thing, and put in their bathrobes an iPod that had that night’s show, so when they came offstage, they’d grab their stuff, get in their car and they would have the show with them right then and there. No one had done anything like that at all,'” Variety.com reports.
Variety.com reports, “Soon after the iPod came out, ‘Mick was right on it. He was like, ‘I want to get every night’s show so I can listen to it that night and know what was good and what didn’t work, etc.’ So they established this whole thing working with the background crew, I showed them where you could daisy-chain the iPods and synchronize them at once. So it was really fun. From there they used GarageBand for their last album as they did all their demos.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: So, when it comes to licensing a tune, it sounds like any old OS will do, but when The Stones want their stuff to work, just like the rest of us, they use Macs and iPods.