Help Needed Over Whether To Get Cubase/logic, logic illogical? Cubase badly written? Options

[Drainland]

Hi,

I'm just about to get an iMac g4 800mhz for making music. Up until now I"ve been using an atari 1040ST and Cubase for pure sequencing and syncing vox etc from multitrack.

It's looking to me like Cubase / Logic are the main choices and although my instinct is to go with Cubase, as I've used it for years on the ST, I'm put off by a lot of the comments I've been reading about running it on OSX. Logic sounds really good, however I'm reading a lot about how difficult it can be to use. A lot of people are saying Cubase is a lot more intuitive and "fun". I think I read somewhere that Logic started life as "notator" on the ST and I could not get my head around that at all - so I opted for Cubase.

So I'm really not sure what to do. I want something that works well on the Mac platform - but something that's easy to use.

This is for a bedroom set up. Few hardware synths, sampler, bunch of outboard. I need decent audio and midi abilities.

Any help would be greatly appreciated - thanks!

[xingu]

Heh, I try to give back. It was guys like Rickenbacker here that helped get me going last fall. I just tries to calls em as I sees em.

All I can say to your new inquiry is that I have things running fine with LA5.5 on my G4 700 iMac, but my processing requirements might not be as high as yours (considering you need either Gold or Plat). I would guess you'll be ok provided your configuration meets the required specs that emagic lists.

I did a considerable amount of research on the external drive question, and wound up with an OWC Mercury Elite 80G firewire drive for Christmas (a great way to overcome any financial restrictions ). Ideally, you never want to put audio files on the same drive as your OS and apps (audio meaning Logic or Cubase song files - regular old audio like mp3s are ok). A search of this forum for "external drive" will tell you that quick enough. I did run my system (granted, not every day or anything) for 6 months before I got the OWC without any problems. I believe the best way to do things if you have to stick with the internal drive is to partition so the audio app is sitting on a different partition from the audio. I know nothing about setting this up, but it is definitely discussed some on this forum so try doing a search.

Sure, you can backup to CD or whatever, but that's not the point of the external drive. I think it has to do with handling the processes of the application at the same time as searching for/reading/writing all the multiple audio files during playback and recording, but I'm no tech-whiz. You might want to also try searching for external drive and partitioning info. at the cubase.net forum - I seem to recall finding a wealth of advice and background there as well. Short and sweet - it's possible, just not recommended for the ideal setup.

Just thought of one other thing- and I only bring this up because you didn't specifically mention it and it might mean a larger investment than you anticipated. The new iMacs (including mine) do not have audio inputs, so you will need an audio interface if you don't already have one. That old Atari also has a MIDI port too, doesn't it? Again, no dice with the iMac, but you were probably already aware of that.