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!

[Drainland]

Thanks guys for the help - and Xingu that was pretty comprehensive.

OK I think I'm going to opt for Logic - either Gold 5 or maybe go for platinum 6 because I need some of the features that the basic package doesn't have. I've rang several dealers as well after the posts and the consensus seems to be go Logic if on Mac. Even spoke to an old ST Cubase user who went Logic. I understand that it can be a bit difficult to set up but once you've done that things are ok.

Another question though - will it be fine running it on the G4 800mhz iMac? I know Emagic recommend getting a dedicated harddrive for it - but I can't afford this on top of all the other bits and pieces I need. So will the internal one be fine? I won't really be using the computer for anything else apart from music.

And presumably I can just make back ups to either CDRs or zip disks?

Thanks again! These macmusic forums are a beautiful thing.