Hello! Newbie could use some advice

[d474ang3l]

Hello everyone. I'm an English teacher from NY living in Japan. I love to draw and have a fine arts degree but I've always wanted to get into making music.
I'm looking into buying a new computer to set up my first DAW. I have always owned pc's in the past. I was designing flash and graphics or web surfing so I never needed a great system. I'm thinking of buying a MacG5 but I have no experience with Macs. Buying my system is the first step, I can't even demo software until I get one but I don't know if I should buy a mac or pc.
Please send me your opinons.
Thanks

[seraph]

Hi d474ang3l
welcome to electro-music.com
about your question: I guess PC users will tell you to buy a PC, Mac user will tell you to buy a Mac.
Personally I use an iMacG5 and a PowerBook G4 so you can easily guess what my advice could be.

[elektro80]

A mac G5 is cool. Some software isn´t optimized for the mac though.. like Ableton Live. Cubase works ok but it tends to be a hog compared with that MOTU app and Logic and others.

A mac comes with Garageband and projects made in Garageband can be taken further in Logic Express and Logic Pro.

The hardware is marginally more expensive, but then this is about choosing OS X or not. Macs aren´t underperformers as some are claiming. This is basically about how well the software is written.

[Kassen]

It heavily depends on on what you want to do with it. Logic for example now only runs on Mac's, Live only works well on pc and the more accedemic stuff tends to centre around Linux.

It also depends on your budget; pc's are far cheap then Mac's. Even if you aren't that limited by budget pc's can make sense since you can configure your own for your own needs (or have it done for you).

I don't fully agree with Elektro that it's about wether or not you want OSX; the core of OSX is freely available on pc in the form of BSD. At best it's about wether you like the graphical interface. A much more important question is what you want to be compattible with. You may want to be able to use speciffic programs or certain asecories. You may also want to be compatible with your friends so you can exchange files.

If none of those factors is deciding to you I'd go with pc and windows (and keep the DAW offline!!!!) not because I like Windows so much but because it's so universal and getting help or freeware will be much easier as well as the price.

Considder what music you'd like to write and what you might need for this; that might heavily influence what you need.

[d474ang3l]

Thanks for all of your input. I guess I'm not really sure what I want to do yet because I'm brand new. Basically, I've been a visual artist all of my life (drawing, painting, graphics) so I've always been creative but I know nothing about making music. It's something I've always wanted to do, especially since I fell in love with electronic music 6 or 7 years ago. Most of the advice I've gotten so far points to me running Reason and Recycle or Ableton Live. I like hard trance or KMFDM style stuff. Money's not really an issue, I make enough that over about 4 months I could afford a G5, MIDI, electric guitar, and all the software I need. But unless I hear a really compelling reason to switch to Mac, I think maybe I should stick with a PC because that's what I know.
Another thing is that I have no computer at all right now (I'm posting from work). All of my old graphic designs are stored on an external hard drive I've been lugging around for a year after my old system burnt out. I need to hook a firewire card into whatever system I buy to access them. I was planning to use the same computer for graphics, internet access and DAW. From what I hear, I'm not supposed to have my DAW hooked up to the internet. It seems I may want to buy a cheap Dell for internet and graphics and a whole second system for music.

[Kassen]

It's not just DAW; I think hanging anything running Windows on the net without a dedicated firewall is suicidally stupid. You simply have no security at all; sensitive data may become public and of cource there is the risk of your computer becoming involved in computer crime.

How about multi-booting the graphics and DAW on the same machine and using a Mac-mini or cheap Linux box to browse?

For hard trance and industrial styles you might want to look into Fruity Loops, it's fairly popular for that and quite accessible.

[seraph]

[elektro80]

Well, I still will insist that this is mainly about OS X or not. BSD is the core together with the next Mach kernel, and you also get a full basic workstation installation of all sorts of UNIX stuff and Apache / PHP and more. As such, Mac OS X is probably the biggest UNIX platform ever. However, Apple has added a lot of stuff to this. The most interesting for you is the Audio Core and Midi Core stuff. You can look this up at Apples website. This also means that there are a lot of features on the OS level that you simply do not get on Linux or XP. You can get similar stuff, but then this won´t be integrated into the OS in the same way.
OS X has a very sensible arcitecture for drivers for ...whatever..

The hardware isn´t really that expensive, all things considered. Go into an Apple Store and ask if they can show you the insides of a G5. Take a look inside. This is no Dell box.

As for internet surfing and DAW, you can do both on a mac. There is no need for dedicated computers.

One of the best buys in DAWs these days is probably Logic Pro. It comes with an impressive number of virtual instruments and plugins.

It is often being said that macs are easier to use. I am not sure about that one. It all depends. The GUI is pretty good and there are a lot of seriously cool features accessible from the GUI. How easy it is depends a lot on how much you are willing to learn about the OS.

Macs also come with a lot of bundled software. Pretty much 100% of this lot works great and adds even more features.

Modern macs are robust and easy to fix if something goes wrong.

On the other hand, if you want to use Ableton Live, then you should consider a PC.
Kassen might be right about PCs being less expensive, but this can be argued in several ways.

Note: There is a huge difference in performance between the big G5s and the G4 powerbooks. The current Apple laptops are very nice computers indeed, but they are also a tad anemic for very cpu intensive tasks.


btw. there is expected a lot of new Apple announcements this month.. starting today.

[seraph]

[Kassen]

[d474ang3l]

I also have to consider I'm an American living in Japan. I've only been here 3 months and don't speak much Japanese. (and I undertand almost nothing). I'm also stuck in a really small town. For me, visiting my local Apple store means a shinkansen ticket and someone in the store who speaks English. Computers (like everything else) are more expensive here. Dell is the only company I know that will ship a computer to you from inside Japan with English already installed on it. Otherwise, I end up with a Japanese language computer I can't use, or have to find someone to switch it for me. If I only need one computer for everything, I'll proably pony up for the iMac G5. It's about 150,000 yen, but only if I can get it in English.
Thanks for all your advice!

[unizzon]

[Kassen]

[elektro80]

And yet again, I must point out that this is caused by how Ableton is developing their application and that the tools that they use to compile for mac aren´t quite up to it.

Apple has the XCODE enviroment which is very good. Ableton isn´t using this. This is however in general a quite common problem which often also affects the PC platform and it doesn´t really always show only when producing crossplatform code. If the code for the application, the programming enviroment and its libraries and then the compiler isn´t effective enough you will end up with inefficient code.

But yes.. Kassen is right about Ableton Live. Live will run OK on a mac, but several features will be much faster on a PC than a mac. This won´t be solved unless Abeton fixes the code. Theoretically they could have chosen to optimize Live for mac and theoretically using several features in the mac hardware and OS they could have ended up with a version that could have been faster on macs than on PCs.

[unizzon]

Interesting,didn't know that.In package you get both setup cds,for PC and Mac also and I thought that Live works on both platforms similar.I've just posted a message to Live support about that and will report when I get an answer.

[unizzon]

This is the answer I got from Ableton tech support:

[elektro80]

Sounds reasonable. You can take this in several directions. Obviously his answer cannot be much different from this. I have heard a slightly different version from some Apple employees. "Ableton has simply not invested enough efforts in getting the mac version optimized" etc.. not using the proper development tools etc etc etc.

In this case I cannot quite see this as problematic. Ableton has done a far better job with Live compared with how Adobe has handled Photoshop and Indesign.

This is really not about Ableton being evil. I think it is highly unrealistic to demand such products to be 100%. Developing applications such as Live is highly complex and costly.

[elektro80]

The answer you got from Ableton´s tech supprt is of course quite reasonable. The smart choice is to focus on the new CPUs.

Another matter is if people are using the "crossplatform" application in the same manner. I have seen this a lot with Cubase 5 VST 32. I have some PC friends who have been completely shocked by the performance of my oldish mac ( Powermac G4 dual 1.25 GHZ) and what they are seeing at how on their PCs. When I looked into this I discovered that they simply weren´t using Cubase in the same way I am. My mac is in fact slightly faster than their PCs, but I also havef aster disks, more disks, 2 gigs of ram and I am using other plugins and other softsynths. In their eyes the mac is far superior. Personally I haven´t yet completely switched to OS X on the DAW macs. I am slowly introducing a G5 into my workflow, but I still have a lot of old projects in OS9/Cubase5VST32. Anyway, the performance of an application depends on many factors.

That said, I still think that right now the Apple laptops are a bit anemic.

[Kassen]

I don't think Ableton is being evil at all. Mr. Henke hinted at trying several optimisation forms (I'm not realy aware of PPC compiler optimisations) and that it made little difference. I have no doubt at all that they tried hard to optimise it all.

The G5 is having heat problems which is preventing a portable version with the results we all know of.

Typically a more uniform platform should result in more stability so the future generation of Mac's might be a interesting platform, considering speed and stability, not just for MacOS but also for other systems. I do think it's wise to postpone judgement on those untill they actually hit the street.

Frankly I think Ableton would realy like to perform well on Mac; it took a long time for them to implement right mouse button clicks, for example. I do not think they are holding back on the Mac side of things.