darcyb62

Just Bought A Macbook...

I've been debating for a while on whether or not I should jump ship on the PC platform> I went shopping on the weekend and ended up with a 2 gHz MacBook. I was looking on the Windows side but I wasn't prepared to go the Vista route and there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of hardware left with XP preloaded, so I decided to bite the bullet and go Mac.

Now I need to decide what to do on the DAW side. With Windows I had been using Tracktion but as of late I had doing more and more with a product called Podium. Boot camp will keep me going for a while here but I do want to make a full transition to the Mac.

I don't want to spend a whole lot of money on this so I am looking at the following:

Tracktion 3 Ultimate Bundle
Logic Express
Cubase Studio 4

I've looked at Ableton Live on the Windows side and could never get into so I'm not considering it. Am I overlooking anything?

It's also looking like I have to abandon my favorite drum program (Jamstix) so I am curious as to what some lower cost options might be in this area.

I appreciate any feedback you might have...

Darcy

Powerbook Cost Justified?

It has finally come time for me to upgrade my hardware. I have been currently been using an old PIII 500mHz with 512Meg of ram and a slow hard disk. I use Tracktion for my host and with a lot track freezing, it becomes somewhat usabe (but just barely)...

Up until recently I had been considering staying on the Windows side, but with the recent introduction of the Mac Mini I decided to take a more serious look at what Apple could offer, so I've tried to do a bit of comparison. I'm committed to purchasing a notebook and I tried to target $2500 (Cdn) for cost.

This is what I have come up with...

On the Apple side:

Powerbook G4 combo drive
15.2-inch TFT Display
1280x854 resolution
1.5GHz PowerPC G4
512MB DDR333 SDRAM
80GB 5400rpm Hard Drive
ATI Mobility Radeon
9700 (64 MB DDR)
Backlit keyboard
Gigabit Ethernet
FireWire 400 & 800
Analog audio in/out
DVI & S-Video out

Cost is $2499 (cdn)

On the PC side:
Dell Inspiron 9200
Intel® Pentium® M 755 Processor (2GHz/400MHz FSB)
17" ultrawide xga+
1 gig sdr ram
128MB ATI's™ Mobility Radeon™ 9700
24X CD-RW/DVD Combination Drive
60GB 7200rpm Hard Drive

I might be wrong on this, but it seems to me that from a performance perspective, Dell would be the better option. In addition, there seems to be a greater number of low cost / free plugins for thw Windows side verses the Mac side (but I might be totally wron with respect to this as my experiience to date has been solely limited to the PC side).

I am really trying to justify the move to Mac but its been a difficult journey. Hopefully this forum can help provide me with some added insight.

Thanks.