ive been loooking into buying a mac recently.
i would wish to acquire a G4 Powerbook if the prices were not so steep, mainly for use with Renoise w/ a few decent vstis & vsts & supercollider3.
i probably wont go with a Powerbook as of yet, so ive been looking into all of them, the Mac mini , Power mac, Imac, emac.
It looks like either i should go with a mac mini or a power mac.
the mac mini’s price looks good but if i go with it then i would have to buy yet another audio interface. so thats also why im looking at a powermac because i have a m-audio 24/96, but it would be perfect to have a power book an use my echo io. so its definetly a toss up on which i should go with. my prime concern is for it to be powerful enough to run renoise w/vsti’s, sound quality & low latency. (without me having to not eat for a few months)
well, basically i’m looking for what everyone would suggest.
like minimum requirements to run renoise w/ vsti’s
so far ive been told that a Powerbook w/ 1.25GHZ, 1 gig of RAM runs Digital Performer and 3-4 instances of Pluggo @ 12ms latency.
iBooks are better value than Powerbooks. There’s a hack for the dual monitor option called screen spanning doctor, and having two monitors is one of the main reasons people go for powerbooks over iBooks (so in other words using screen spanning doctor gives you extra $$$ of value for no extra cost). The only drawback I’ve seen so far is the lack of internal audio inputs in the iBook, but since laptop audio is rubbish anyway an external firewire or usb audio device is the only way.
Both types of machine still have Apple’s slow-as-a-crippled-dog bus speed of 133mHz, so if you’re after raw speed only go Intel or, if you’re cashed up, get a dual processor G5. Then again, a second hand dual processor G4 >1gHz per processor should be plenty for most dsp.
As far as software goes, hell I’m still trying to figure out that one myself. The only way I can see in that area is to write your own. It’s slow and tedious, but in the end you get exactly what you want. tailor made to your machine. Not to mention the extra cred if you make it big
Also, the built-in audio is pretty good, so you don’t need “another audio interface”. Good enough for semi-pro music production, since one doesn’t need something like ASIO on Mac.
I got the “middle” model with more HD space and a gig of ram.
1.8GHz PowerPC G5
600MHz Frontside bus
Pretty cheap for a mac, reasonably portable, You can plug in your m-audio device, the drivers are available as far as I can tell (Delta Audiophile 2496) - And for a desktop, it’s pretty quiet under normal conditions.
I also have a iBook G4 800mhz. Works fine for renoise.
