G5 Imac?, How will it cope? Options

[enygma]

The iMac G5 is a very quiet machine. One of the local Mac dealers here had set one up to replace the eMac they use for their point of sale system. There is very little sound output coming from the system that I recalled. I should have my 17" iMac G5 sometime next week. I'll probably confirm what the sound is like on it afterwards. I guarantee that it will be much quieter than the system I am using right now...

[tunepoet]

Hello,

I was just reading a review on the dual 2.5 G5 in “Recording” magazine. And I thought I would just copy the concluding statement from the review. My point is not to suggest that you can’t make great music on a lesser-powered Mac, but only to agree with this review that you DO get what you pay for, and the dual G5 does offer greater flexibility. And to me, that represents always having a computer that will keep up with your progress as a computer focused musician. Or to put it more simply, you don’t NEED a dual G5, but if you can swing it, you will be happy you did.

Blessings,
Damon H

Ps.
The Mac they compared the dual G5 to was, coincidently, the eMac 700, which just so happens to be the Mac I replaced with the G5. Of course, the difference between a more powerful Mac (than the eMac 700) and the dual G5 should be considered as well.

---------

***Regarding the dual G5***

“Is the dual G5 for you? That question hinges primarily on another: are you or aren’t you already a Mac user? If you aren’t, then you’ll need to consider all the reasons to start working with a Mac vs. staying with a PC. But if you are, then the significant investment embodied in the dual G5 represents an equal return in power and flexibility. Anything that a Mac could do to date can now be done more quickly, better, and more silently than ever before.”

“Recording” Magazine Review
Mike Metlay with Devon Brent

This post has been edited by tunepoet: Wed 13 Oct 2004, 03:50

[dangt]

So what your saying is if possible get a good computer rather than a shit one. Cool! thanks

Hopefully for most of us its about the music we create, otherwise its just collecting gear to impress yourself with. Great results can be achived on very simple gear or big $$ gear with the right preperation and performances. also saying that poor results are also possible on both ends of the gear list spectrum.

Ive recently lost (was damaged through water ingress into my studio) my G3 powerbook 500mhz, that was a great machine for tracking, mixing and arranging songs in PT LE, reason, live.. as well as basic mastering through peak and t-racks. Im thinking the G5 imac will be suitable for me to continue to write and publish quality songs.

Im thinking of changing my approach to mixing and mastering but, so to use some of my professional freinds skills to better my product instead of getting all flusted over mixing sounds and tech stuff. i would rather concentrate on the recording, sequencing and arranging. I will save heaps of time and money. As it is cheaper to release a few projects a year this way than to buy all the pro gear and spend hours locked in side mixing and mastering.

[gdoubleyou]

You should be in good shape with the iMac G5, it beats a dual 1.42 G4 in most tasks.
Check it out.
http://www.barefeats.com/imacg5.html

[enygma]

Alright. I have had a chance to play around with my 17" 1.8GHz G5 iMac for about a week now. Regarding hardware noise and such. Generally, in idle, it creates very minimal noise. You can hear the noise from the fans mainly. The hard drive is barely audible even when it is loading files from it, which can also be a problem. There is no HDD LED anywhere on the system, so I can only tell if it is reading and writing to hard disk by listening closely. So basically, if something is moving slow or I have been waiting a while, I can't tell if the system froze up, or my hard drive is going nuts without listening to see if I can hear the clicking of the hard drive. The fans inside will speed up when processor or GPU intensive tasks are going on, and the fans do get loud when under load. I did a render in Maya which took about 2 minutes to render, and the fans were slowly accelerating the whole time of the render. The render wasn't long enough for me to tell if there is a peak to the noise or not. And at the moment, I have nothing to tell me what temp the CPU is running at to see if the processor would continue rising in temp when the fans peak. However, when the fans are running quickly, I can feel the heat dissipating from the slot in the back. Air intake is at the bottom of the system.

General OS useage, this G5 was my first time using OSX, or any Mac OS for that matter. In general, I can see why professionals choose the Mac for video editing, graphics, publication and music. It is just a very nice system in general to multitask with, even within the same application. I would find it hard to go back to Photoshop for Windows if I got used to playing around with Photoshop for Mac, and Final Cut Express works very nicely with Expose. My main beef with the OS is web browsing, and windows resizing. These two things are generally sluggish. At least on my system, but I also read an article where someone had the same complaints working on a Dual 2GHz G5. Scrolling in the web browser is slow, and web page rendering is twice as slow as IE for Windows, or Konqueror or Firefox on Linux. Even Firefox seems to be slow to scroll in OSX. Most applications that scroll that I have used seem very sluggish, and Windows resizing can be very sluggish as well.

All in all, it is a very nice system, and saves A LOT of space. I'll have to get a smaller desk now that I have replaced my PC...

I haven't tried it with any music applications other than Garage Band, and that is without a MIDI keyboard. So I can't really comment on my music experiences with it. Other than the fact I need some more instruments in Garage Band...

[fastlanephil]

Go to versiontracker.com and dl midikeys. You can then use your iMac G5 keyboard as a midi controler. Also go to iCab.de and dl the free iCab Mac browser. It's pretty fast.

This post has been edited by fastlanephil: Tue 26 Oct 2004, 04:14

[rafisaar]

Since this thread has stopped until today, are there any "real-life" experiences with the iMac G5 and music apps (especially Logic Pro)?

This whole thread (and other topics in Agora) all give speculations based on other Mac platforms or point to benchmark tests, but none are giving real experiences with the iMac G5 and music.

I wish I had the fastest PowerMac DP G5 tower with a nice big LCD display, but the iMac G5 is simply way cheaper and if it will fit my needs then that's my way to go.
Can you believe I'm still stuck with a PowerMac 8600 (604 - pre G3) with Opcode Studio Vision Pro running on Mac OS 9?

The music I make is mostly MIDI music, planning to use software synths, with audio recording mostly just for vocals, normally recording a single mic at a time (but totalling around 8 or 10 audio tracks).
Logic Pro 6 and the FW Audiophile are already waiting on my desk for the next Mac. Just need to decide if that will be the iMac G5.


Thanks ,
Rafi