Starting A Home Studio, can anyone help with hard/software? Options

[jeauris]

Hi everyone. This is my first time posting here. I am a musician, and I am going to be getting a G5 pretty soon. I already own a Mackie 14 channel mixer, but no real software.
I tried to set up my own home studio on my old PC a few years ago, and wasted a few grand$.
I am hoping you guys could give me advice about: hardware- I want to be able to record maybe 16 channels in real time to my Mac; and for software I was thinking about using Protools.
If anyone can help me out I would appriciate it greatly!

[Jeff Pelletier]

Well buddy, you just got into a hell of a decision-making crisis. You'll have to take time to consider many things such as: YOUR BUDGET!, what you're going to do with this system, what sounds good to you, etc...etc...etc.

However, I can say that you little Mackie has some pretty decent little pre-amps in it, so it should cover that section. Another suggestion I would like to make is....DON'T get a G5 just yet! You may find yourself on "the bleeding edge" as opposed to the "cutting edge" (compatibility problems, bugs, etc...), a G4 would do the job just fine. Lastly, a Digidesign 002 (includes a simplistic control surface + 4 mic preamps) or 002 Rack (4 pre-amps) would be a good-enough interface between your pre-amps in the Mackie to your computer....and hey....you get ProTools with it! This set-up would give you a total of 8 analog ins simultaniously (enough for a small home set-up).
16 inputs would make your system pretty damn expensive...you'd be getting into the realm of ProTools HD...and, Do you have 16 mics????

Anyway...I hope this will help...and this is my opinion and only that.

Keep on trackin' tunes!
Jeff