Which Mac? Which Os?, Mac hardware search Options

[Angelgob]

Hello,

I have to upgrade now from my good old beige G3, b/c I am running out of processing power!

I probably won't dare to take the plunge with a G5 just yet, so which G4 would be the best (second hand or new) to buy? And which OS should I use and which audio card? At the moment I am using the audio in/out from my Mac.

I have Cubase 5, Recycle, reason and rebirth. I will need a sccsi card for my sccsi audio drive and to connect with my sampler to send stuff from recycle over. Should I get a serial card/connection with the G4 to connect my serial midi interface or get a usb one? (I heard the usb midi interfaces weren't as good as the serial ones?)

I am going to the Mac Expo in London this week, and would like to be able to ask some intelligent questions.... :-)

Thank you for taking your time and giving some advice if you can.

Angel

[Synthetic]

USB midi interfaces not as good as serial interfaces? that is an odd notion... modern computer musicians everywhere are using USB midi interfaces on the majority and only a few use serial anymore. You would be better off selling serial interface and getting USB... if you get a serial adapter for it... you run into the chance of the adapter not being compatible with the midi interface (those adapters aren't compatible with every serial device) and a possible incompatibility with your software on new system. And if you already have nice external SCSI drive you use for audio recording... and still want to continue to use it... you will need to get a PCI SCSI card for the new G4 to run the drive or you could look into getting one of the few fast firewire drives to replace it.

[Blamm]

You may want to consider the G5 now. I'm not sure if other vendors will follow suite, but Digidesign has just dropped support for G4's that aren't PowerBooks, iMacs or iBooks. Everything else is going G5. You might want to take the plunge, because you may have to upgrade your G4 in a year or two anyway.

Just my two cents on the matter.