Mac ponderings

[3V17C]

OK.. so my home PC is pretty ancient, choc full of crap and slower than a slow thing... Now I'm not loaded but have recently been looking at going the refurbished Mac route - for my limited budget I can get either an older iMac or a G5 with 2Gb ram and loads of hard drive space.

Now I need to get into some home recording..I've got so many bits n pieces knocking around on my hard drive and now i really am going to get motivated and finish some tracks off (honestly...no..but really.. i am!!) - I'm used to using Cubase SX on the PC.. I'm guessing that will run OK on these older Macs (my current PC only has 256 meg of DDR ram..)

So.. questions...

I'm take it any audio files I've recorded on PC will transfer across to Cubase on the Mac ok.. but I'm guessing the .cpr project files won't.....?

Will I need some sort of USB/firewire interface? (My PC currently records OK with very, very minimal latency direct into the soundcard thanks to some decent ASIO drivers)

VST instruments.. readily available for Mac? Battery/B4 etc....

Soundcards... I occasionally use some basic sounds off my PC soundcard (ancient Soundblaster) will I be able to do similar with Mac?

I take it with the celebrated Mac efficiency it should be fairly painless to get up and running as one of the stumbling blocks I always seem to have is computer issues at the moment!! Drives me mad! Every time I feel creative I have to spend half the night getting things working properly first!!

I have got an old iBook which admittedly I only use for a bit of text writing and web stuff but am reasonably familiar with my way round a Mac. I work from home at the moment too doing graphics etc so would imagine Mac being much better for that also.. (Will prob get one with 2 hard drives so can keep music and work stuff seperated.)

Anyways..just rambling now!! Any thoughts, comments etc gratefully recieved!!

peace

c

[JMT3781]

although a bit basic, garageband comes free with your mac and is very useable, plenty of decent instruments and loops. Always the option of expanding it too, for ore instruments, effects and loops.

I think if its the same version of cubase the cpr's should work, i think i did that once in my first year of uni, before i bought my mac...

cant remember

[plumbob]

Another option would be to keep your old screen etc , and get a newer Mac Mini , as said before Garageband comes with the Mac so if you use that you have a path through to Logic , as Garageband files can be imported into Logic.

As for SX files they may well work , but I would probably advise you to , convert all Vst instrument midi to wav files , and extend all the files so that they all start from zero , and then import these into your project and they will be easier to line up.

I haven't had a look at Cubase for a while , but there was a phase where Sx ran better on a Pc than a Mac for obvious reasons ( Apple bought Steinbergs main competion Emagic, and went on to produce Logic with all the bells and whistles thrown in including the kitchen sink ).

Anyway come on over to Macworld the water is lovely warm !!!

[spacecowboy]

[quote name='plumbob' post='763628' date='Mar 4 2010, 08:22 AM']Another option would be to keep your old screen etc , and get a newer Mac Mini ,[/quote]

A Mac Mini will not be powerful enough to use as a platform for recording music, Garageband especially the computer and memory usage by this program is substantial, the G5 Tower will be absolutely perfect for your needs, the iMac's are fine, but G5's were designed for Designers and Musicians and the processors will keep the machine alive and kicking when you need it most, I use a Mac Pro at work and if you had a spare £3000 i'd recommend my current work setup but as thats not the case i'm positive the G5 will do you proud, and you'll find the two hard drives a god send.

At home for recording i use a Mac Book Pro and i use a Tascam US21L interface which is USB, zero latency only when using the Mac Book's Fast USB port *left hand side* if you plug it in the right hand side you experience a couple of milli second latency issues which will throw you off if you're monitoring through the software, but the Tascam has a direct input control so that does for Monitoring.

VST's are widely available and very usuable most PC Cubase VST's will transfer across seamlessly as will your Cubase Projects, Logic is a fantastic audio recording and mastering solution though and should be looked in to, Apple also have their own VST style instrument plugins that they call AU's or Audio Units *just to be awkward* and these can be used in Garageband and Logic, I'm also very sure some clever coders have created a AU to VST and VST to AU software so they can be interchangable.

Hope thats of some help, if you have any questions feel free to PM me.

[urb]

[quote name='spacecowboy' post='764045' date='Mar 4 2010, 03:35 PM']A Mac Mini will not be powerful enough to use as a platform for recording music, Garageband especially the computer and memory usage by this program is substantial, the G5 Tower will be absolutely perfect for your needs, the iMac's are fine, but G5's were designed for Designers and Musicians and the processors will keep the machine alive and kicking when you need it most, I use a Mac Pro at work and if you had a spare £3000 i'd recommend my current work setup but as thats not the case i'm positive the G5 will do you proud, and you'll find the two hard drives a god send.

At home for recording i use a Mac Book Pro and i use a Tascam US21L interface which is USB, zero latency only when using the Mac Book's Fast USB port *left hand side* if you plug it in the right hand side you experience a couple of milli second latency issues which will throw you off if you're monitoring through the software, but the Tascam has a direct input control so that does for Monitoring.

VST's are widely available and very usuable most PC Cubase VST's will transfer across seamlessly as will your Cubase Projects, Logic is a fantastic audio recording and mastering solution though and should be looked in to, Apple also have their own VST style instrument plugins that they call AU's or Audio Units *just to be awkward* and these can be used in Garageband and Logic, I'm also very sure some clever coders have created a AU to VST and VST to AU software so they can be interchangable.

Hope thats of some help, if you have any questions feel free to PM me.[/quote]

+1

Great advice - one thing I'll add is that 2GB of RAM may soon cause you problems when running Logic with any kind of drum plugin or lots of AUs (VSTs) - but you can easily upgrade to 4GB on a basic Mac Book (or Mac Book Pro) by buying some extra RAM - it's cheaper to buy it for a desktop Mac but it's still affordable (£89) for a laptop - it'll be worth it and will help things run a lot smoother

Install vid
[url="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zjzv-mJxFY"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Zjzv-mJxFY[/url]

Link to the actual RAM
[url="http://www.amazon.co.uk/MACBOOK-667MHZ-STICKS-MANUFACTURED-KINGSTON/dp/B001P3WSNI"]http://www.amazon.co.uk/MACBOOK-667MHZ-STI...N/dp/B001P3WSNI[/url]

I started using Cubase on a PC and got really frustrated with it (this was some years ago and I'm sure it's improved since) so I switched to a Mac about 4 years ago and haven't looked back since - this is my current home set up:



It works great!

Cheers

Mike

[plumbob]

This might be worth reading

[url="http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=269568"]http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=269568[/url]

[XB26354]

[quote name='spacecowboy' post='764045' date='Mar 4 2010, 03:35 PM']A Mac Mini will not be powerful enough to use as a platform for recording music, Garageband especially the computer and memory usage by this program is substantial, the G5 Tower will be absolutely perfect for your needs, the iMac's are fine, but G5's were designed for Designers and Musicians and the processors will keep the machine alive and kicking when you need it most, I use a Mac Pro at work and if you had a spare £3000 i'd recommend my current work setup but as thats not the case i'm positive the G5 will do you proud, and you'll find the two hard drives a god send.[/quote]

That's not correct.
I think you'll find that the latest Mac Minis will run as much audio stuff, if not more than the most powerful quad G5. My iMac certainly does substantially more than my Quad 5 ever did (loading old projects is a joy when you see the CPU meter drop down to about half where it was before).
Don't be fooled by the workstation look and see the bench tests - I believe SOS did this a while back and even the entry level Core 2 Duo Mac Mini runs more plugins etc than the Quad 2.5 G5. It is also much more future proof being a new model. Within the next 2 years it is highly unlikely anyone big will be supporting G5 processors with new software.
The only downside to the Mini is that you can't easily access the RAM to upgrade it yourself. If you can stretch a little more then I would advise a refurb or s/h entry level iMac (Intel Core 2 Duo) as they have great screens, RAM you can access and plenty of hard drive space for audio etc. The latest ones can also take 16Gb of RAM!
iMac G5s were OK but I've serviced a few dogs - overheating, disc eject launching the DVD across the room, odd hard drive errors etc. The newer aluminium ones look and feel much better made (and are a lot quieter).

[3V17C]

Hmmm.. some useful info so far.. cheers for that... lots to ponder!! i'm terrible when it comes to making decisions!!

One thing... will all these possibilities play streaming video etc ok?... I only ask because my old iBook struggles and stutters when attempting to play youtube vids or anything similar and i wouldn't want that to happen!! A common thing too apparently....


cheers

c

[xgsjx]

My other 1/2 is always on YouTube & I've made a few vids with iMovie without my iMac (2.8 intel) even fluttering.
I'd check your Internet connection if you have trouble. Virgin used to give me 25k on their "upto" 8 meg line, so I switched to their data streaming line (which is now a steady 10 meg).

[jim_bass]

I have a mac mini and use logic express 9 and garageband on it fine. The only time I've have a problem with lag was running the sample content (Lilly Allen - The fear song) off the bonus DVD. But it has about 48 tracks each with ~8 inserts per channel! For everything else it's perfect.

I have put 4gb of ram in it and a fast hard drive though. Not bad for under £500

Don't waste money on a G5, which wont run the new intel only software, when you can get a budget mac that is just as capable. Now a quad core Mac Pro, that's another story.....

[NJE]

I will echo everyone else on the Garageband front. Its a superb bit of software and is capable of some good results. As mentioned it is also compatible with logic so if you ever decide to upgrade you can take your files with you.

I used to have a Mac mini before they switched to the Intel processors and could run some pretty big files on garageband but obviously if you start running Logic and plug-ins it will slow down. I have no idea what the new ones are like but they look pretty powerful now so i am sure you will not have any problems if you buty a new one.

After my MacMini I bought a PowerMac G5 Dual Core. It is a non Intel version but I upgraded it to 6GB RAM and it runs like a dream. I currently have Logic Pro 8 installed and runa few plug-ins and use some large files on Garageband and it doesnt even flinch.

The new Mac Pros are really expensive so I would see about picking up a New Mac Mini, or get a Dual Core G5. You can get some good deals on them on ebay, I was looking the other day as I want to sell mine (need a laptop as I move around a lot)

Interface wise decide what you need liek do you need midi, do you need phantom power for mics, how many tracks will you record at the same time? If you just want to lay vocals down and then guitar and build up track by track Line 6 make a UX1 I think which is good and not too expensive. The Apogee One and Duet is also VERY good but quite expensive.

[3V17C]

hmm ok.. so...I am now the owner of an intel iMac with 2gb of Ram - less than 6 months old, hardly used and at a very good price..so.. pretty pleased with that..

Now... one of the main reasons for getting this was to do some proper home recording - I don't want to get into anything too technical and after having a quick play with garageband it looks like that should be able to do everything I want (recording live vox, bass, guitars with midi keyboards/drums)..... BUT..... drum sounds on it are rubbish!!! Back in the land of Cubase i was using Battery VST instrument and had spent some time setting up a really realistic live sounding kit... how/where can i get something similar for Garageband?!.... I have zero budget at the mo.. so maybe soundfonts are the way to go? any pointers for some good ones as I really want a decent drum sound to start with....

cheers

c

[plumbob]

Haven't done it myself , but Garageband apparently excepts AU instruments or you can get a converter from Fxpansion

I think Battery comes in a AU format so you should be able to use this as a software instrument and carry just as you did before.

Hope that is of some help.