I have a G3 that I bought from a friend who bought a G4 from a friend who bought a G5. The G3 has been sitting around, as I basically have to start from scratch with it (I've put 512M of RAM in it, with two slots to go...other than that, no interface, etc...) I was using my roommate's PC, but I feel like it is time to get my own up and running. I will probably use it mostly for Reason and wave editing, but we used to record six tracks of audio simultaneously on it in ProTools...so I know it is still a very capable machine.

Recording audio tracks is largely dependent upon the speed of the hard disk. My G3 iBook can handle 12+ tracks at once if I use my FW disk.

Reason is a whole other story. That depends upon the CPU and RAM. For a G3, I'd recommend working in OS9 if possible, since it has a much lower overhead than OS X. Also, were you running PT LE or a PT MIX (TDM) system? If its the latter, that will help greatly with CPU usage.

I'd thought about doing a OS9/X dual-boot but I'm thinking now that I'd be best to keep the G3 OS9 and find a used G4 to upgrade to OSX. I'm not trying to do any heavy-duty recording at the moment.

I haven't even turned the G3 on since I added some RAM, but I'm 99% positive that it was LE. Since I don't have an interface, PT won't even load up right now. Part of the original reason for buying the G3 was so that I could send PT files back and forth with the person I bought it from, but I'm not even sure I will end up using PT at all at this point.

my main music machine is the g5 but i love to boot up (old faithful) rebirth on my os9 g3 channeled into ableton live audio-ins to get some occasional old-odd-skool beats and flavor.
rebirth doesn't run on osX so no way i'll switch.
it might only be 5 or ten times a year i'll use rebirth but that's enough to make sure i always have a machine which runs os9.
i also use the g3 for most of my internet stuff.


mcc>
aka clownsitters
sagebomb
lala gondola
evolution2000

This brings up another question (or two) I had. My G3 has Reason on it, but it's asking for a disc and the original owner doesn't know if he even has it anymore. I was seriously considering buying a new copy, but it seems like ReBirth used to come with Reason, and I'm not sure if it does anymore. Do you know about this? I guess it is sort of a non-issue since I just read that ReBirth is now a free download and there are tons of other 303/ emulators out there.

I'm thinking he probably had 2.0 and I'm not sure that 3.0 has really added anything useful. I know 2.5 was a free update...any idea if someone with 2.0 could still download that?