Titanium Powerbook 4 Recording, Hardware Choices? Options

[urbanmatador]

Regarding the TIbook 667mhz, with 512-768 mb ram....and an external 120gb firewire hd, do you think it would be enough to edit X-30 tracks of audio with a reasonable amoun of plugs?

i've gotten up to fifteen tracks with minimal plugins... eight with several plugins... but i've never had occasion to go higher. so i wouldn't know for sure.

my guess? yeah, you could do 30 tracks. get an 800 mhz tibook, get 768 megs of ram, and make sure that your external drive is up to spec (glyph makes good ones. you're looking for a drive which uses the oxford 911 chipset)... that's really going to be the crucial point. without a drive that is full duplex (it can read and write at the same time), your track count is going to suffer no matter what cpu you have. most firewire drives are *not* full duplex. so, do your research in that area.

and word to the mention of a shuttle pro... i've got a little kensington four button mouse, and even that isn't enough to make keyboard navigation easy.

[ratspg]

Thanks for the info...aside from glyph or glyph included, which firewire hard drive products use the Oxford 911 chipest so i can be sure i'm getting full duplex?

thanks

[Levon River]

which firewire hard drive products use the Oxford 911 chipest so i can be sure i'm getting full duplex?

Other World Computing's Mercury Elite drives use the 911 bridge and have excellent specs, reviews, and pricing:

http://eshop.macsales.com/Static_Pages/index.cfm

[karambos]

Why does a full duplex drive help get more tracks from a mac/PC?

[urbanmatador]

Why does a full duplex drive help get more tracks from a mac/PC?

because then the machine can write a track at the same time that it's reading other data off the disk... if it has to pause the writing to do the reading, it can't do as much work. just like why your typing speed goes down if you're holding a cup of coffee in one hand...