Music Production:PC vs. Mac

There is a lot more music production done on the Mac, but with XP the difference between the platforms closed quite a bit. They're both suitable platforms for music production, but the Mac takes an edge for better midi and audio implementations and ease of use in set up.

Do you know what program you're going to use? What kind of music production? The software available may be the deciding factor.

Many people vastly prefer Logic, which is Mac-only now. A whole lot of music you hear on the radio is produced with Logic on Macs. Cubase is a viable option on PCs however.

For electronic music, Fruity Loops Studio is a fantastic program and PC-only. It's less full featured than Logic, but easier to learn. There are many programs like it, though, on the Mac as well (Reason comes to mind).

Most/all of the Native INstruments stuff is PC and Mac. THere is some other neat stuff like Pluggo which is available for the Mac only.

My recommendation would be a 15 or 17 inch powerbook and an Echo Indigo i/o sound card. The 12" powerbook does not have a PCMCIA card slot. Some sort of PCMCIA or external sound card is vital no matter what platform you choose, as the built in sound in laptops sucks because of interference (lots of noise) and very high latencies.

There are also USB and Firewire solutions (check m-audio.com) but the Echo Indigo i/o is an incredible value, plus it's a lot more elegent since it sits inside your computer.

http://www.echoaudio.com/Products/Ca...digo/index.php

PC laptops are not a bad choice, and you'll be able to get a faster machine for the same price, however this is somewhat moot as the Powerbook G4s will be able to handle any audio tasks you throw at them more than adequately.

I think you are better of with PC for 2 main reasons. 1)you already know how to work a pc and 2)you can get a LOADED pc for $3000. As a rule Mac has a smaller software library so a PC will be a winner there. If it is the question of which os? It shouldn't be because if it comes to you needing to run a mac program on a PC or a PC program on a mac, VirtualPC and PearPC got you covered. I think that over all you get better bang-for-the-$ in the PC world just because there is competition and prices are brought down. Also according to many benchmarks a G4 can't compete with a Dothan or AMD-64 system.

I forgot to add--Garage Band, which comes with OS X, is great and an excellent program for getting started with computer based music production.

Be sure to set aside about $200 for a nice USB keyboard such as this one:

http://m-audio.com/index.php?do=prod...76feea92b83c52

They are great not just for the keyboard functions, but also for assigning the knobs and sliders on them to knobs/parameters in the software you are using.

LOL it's funny you obvoiusly have no idea about this topic yet are still pushing the PCs. There is a reason that the majority of music production done nowadays is done on macs. And some very popular programs used for music production are NOT made for PC.

As far as emulation, I hope you're joking--there is no way an emulator can keep up with a ~7ms latency audio stream. Xp and OS X have a hard enough time doing this natively.

you should figure out which software exactly you want to use than buy a system based on that. check out some setups in stores or your friends if any of them do music editing. i would always go for a pc just because im so used to the interfacing, which actually is better for media is just moot opinion.

I do some fiddeling with music files on MixMeister Pro, NI Traktor 2, PCDJ and FruityLoops. Good programs that i use on my P3 with 256mb ram no problem. That is what i was basing my reply from. I admit that emulation is still a long time away from reaching near-perfection (or going getting above Ver 1.0...PearPC is at o.3 right now, WINE is still in alpha and virtualpc...not sure where it SHOULD be). At this point it does somewhat depend on your OS for support of your software, but in the hardware department, PC will be better for your $.

For what you are doing, just about any software will work for you. Garage Band will do what need, and will be very easy to learn, plus it has the benefit of being free if you go with Macs. Also, if you live near an Apple retail store they give free Garage Band classes every week or two. Pro Tools is a good choice for the type of music you want to do if you want something more advanced. It's more difficult to learn but it's a standard for computer music recording nowadays. Basically any modern rock album recorded to computer nowadays will have been done in pro tools. Though the Guitar Tracks will do what you want, you might want to consider getting software which is more widely used and thus more people would be able to help you with it. There will also be tons of documention and books out there on the more well-used packages like Pro Tools or Logic.
To get an idea of that, check out this huge forum for Pro Tools:
http://duc.digidesign.com/

Digidesign also makes some really nice all-in-one hardware/software solutions. They start at $500 and includes a terrific compliment of software, in addition to Pro Tools LE and great plug-ins they include light versions of Amplitude, Sampletank, T-Racks, Reason, and Live which are all very well regarded programs.

Note that this will work on Mac and PC, but for some reason they only claim compatibilty with a handful of PC laptops:
http://digidesign.com/products/compat/le/

This probably means that they only tested it with these to be 100% compatible and others will work.

Incidentally, the Echo Indigo is probably a bad choice for recording guitars since it doesn't have the built in preamped guitar inputs. You'll want to go with one of the external M-audio or Digidesign solutions. It's a great choice for electronic music production though.