What Will Work With My System?, I'm shopping and I need advice! Options

[Roneon]

I want to set up a home studio and I'm not sure which software and sound card to buy. I have a G4 Quicksilver 733mh with 384 mb of ram. It's running OS X 10.1.5 right now and it seems that I will have to upgrade to either Jaguar or Panther. Will Mackie, MOTU, EMagic, CU Base or anything else work on my system? Basically I will only be recording vocals, acoustic and the occasional electric (one at a time). I know I need to get an extra hard drive too but I'm not sure what kind or speed I need.
Any suggestion will be appreciate!

[rickenbacker]

Spike/Traction is an OK bundle, but I'd recommend Logic as your sequencer, probably the Express version. Depends how much money you've got, but Logic's track Freeze function will help you get more mileage out of your 733.

Cubase SX will kill it stone dead - the stated minimum spec for SX3 is a 1GHz, preferably a dual processor model.

Tracktion is OK, but kind of ugly. It works, but I didn't really like it. My two penneth. Try it yourself and see, if you can get a demo.

As for audio interfaces, USB is OK for recording one or two tracks at a time and playing back maybe up to 16 tracks, FireWire is better. And consequently more expensive. Edirol do a nice range of both, M-Audio as well but their drivers are well-known to be flaky. My constant studio companion is the MOTU 828.

Actually, there are dozens of interfaces on the market, including things like Novation's MIDI control keyboards with audio I/O on board. Check everything out and see what you can afford - you're already going to be laying out a tidy sum!

Firewire 400 hard drive, 7,200rpm disk speed, Oxford chipset - that's a pretty standard list of features for music making.

I'm glad you upgraded to Panther - you must be finding the difference from 10.1.5 pretty striking!

You'll need more RAM, too. Preferably as much as your Mac can take.

Good luck - do some research, then ask again!