Please Help. Logic Or Protools? Options

[lantzn]

Hello All,
My son and some friends have started a small garage band. They recently bought some really nice speakers and a mixing board with something like 8-10 channels/tracks. This things has just about every imaginable connections I ever seen on it. I'm a computer graphics person by profession and really get into cool software, I'm now studying Electric Image Universe 3D app. They came to me and asked if I could setup a MP3 jukebox for them after seeing my tower running iTunes. I sold them my iMac 400 DVSE, we dropped in a 160GB drive and a Gig of memory and have currently loaded all our CD collections onto it. They now plug the iMac into the mixing board and the songs really rock over the new speakers! I thought I was at a concert.

Now they want me to be their "sound man" and find some software that we can use to send some tracks into my G4 tower from the mixing board and eventually burn to CD. Last night I loaded the free Pro Tools LE and OMS package. We played around with some simple voice tracks since we didn't have it near the band's equipment. We used the Mac's little microphone to get the sound in. They got pretty excited about it. Of course I had to bootup into OS9 to run ProTools. I'm currently running 10.2.1, have a Radeon 8500AGP, Radeon 7000PCI, 60 and 80GB drives and 2GB of ram in this G4 400 sawtooth tower.

My question, what software for OS X should I be looking at when a OS X version is released? The LE, light, beginners edition is probably all we would ever need. Pro Tools LE looked like it had plenty of features along with the 8 track limit. What about a LE version of Logic? Does one exist. I know we're just now seeing OS X music software coming our way. I can mess around with Pro Tools LE in OS 9 until something is available but I'm not sure if I want to learn it to much if something else would be better. I'm a pretty fast learner and can jump around different software apps without problems.

Thanks

[JustEloy]

The first thing you should do in my opinion is look at what you really want to do....

Because the beautifull thing about harddisk recording nowadays is that you can edit the separate channels as much as you'd like. This would not be very handy if every instrument was recorded on one channel, because you'd probably wouldn't want to use the same EQ settings on all the instruments....

So that (almost) leaves 2 simple ways of working:

Do you want to have everybody play at the same time while recording????
In this case you'll want to have a Audio interface that has multiple inputs, one for the bass, one for the singer etc. etc. (maybe even multiple mics for the drummer??)

The other way is to start recording for example the drums, then you have one audio track containing the drums. After that you play the drums (over headphones...) while recording the bass. Then you have another track containing the bass..... You just keep following this process until you have recorded all the individual instruments, now you can apply different EQ setting, different Plug-ins (reverb....) to all the individual audio tracks (with individual audio tracks i refer to the individual instruments..)
In this case you can use a simple audio interface, 2 in 2 out.....

Now you have total control over you mix....!

Just for clearing things out, a computer works with digital information (10011100011100, just to make it easy...). When you play a instrument it will make an analog sound (except for off course some digital synthesizers....).
This analog sound has to be coverted to digital information (this is also where the bits and the kilohertzes of a audio interface come in). The device that does the conversion from analog to digital (and reversed) is the audio interface..... After it has been digitized the computer can work with it, so programs like Digital Performer, Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase etc.

I hope i helped you out on some points....


If you need some more info or somethings are unclear, just let me know, i'll be happy to help you out....

Greetings Eloy.