FenderBender said:
I think Chris Fitzgerald really hit the nail on the head when he said he keeps his music Mac off the net, even more important for PC.
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Would you choose Apple over PC?
- Thread starter FenderBender
- Start date
I think Chris Fitzgerald really hit the nail on the head when he said he keeps his music Mac off the net, even more important for PC.
Blisshead said:
Very true, if I have been netting I usually restart before doing something heavy, because if I dont my chance of crashing is much higher; after something happens a few [
] times you usually learn from it.
Another cool thing to do is dual boot your machine with a minimal system for the net and another for real work. Maybe a small linux partion and an XP partition that doesn't see the net.Aaron Noguer said:Very true, if I have been netting I usually restart before doing something heavy, because if I dont my chance of crashing is much higher; after something happens a few [
My suggestion would be to ONLY listen to those people that know and use both machines.
In my graphics work I always here the MAC guys tell me how superior their machine is,..... while most of them don't know how to boot up a PC.
With regards to work machines and net surfering, I strongly agree to keep them on seperate machines. But saying that, my home music pc has worked with no trouble for 1-2 years and has never been on the net. My work MAC has worked trouble free for 1-2 years and I surf the net all day. Correct me if I'm wrong but that might have something to do with virus writers wanting to affect 95% of the computers out there.
If I had the money I would have both platforms at work and at home but I would probably use the MAC more often.
My 2 cents.
In my graphics work I always here the MAC guys tell me how superior their machine is,..... while most of them don't know how to boot up a PC.
With regards to work machines and net surfering, I strongly agree to keep them on seperate machines. But saying that, my home music pc has worked with no trouble for 1-2 years and has never been on the net. My work MAC has worked trouble free for 1-2 years and I surf the net all day. Correct me if I'm wrong but that might have something to do with virus writers wanting to affect 95% of the computers out there.
If I had the money I would have both platforms at work and at home but I would probably use the MAC more often.
My 2 cents.
Wheter you use Mac or PC, generally it's best to have a dedicated machine for audio aside from the one that you use for everything else. My latest DAW is baed on a pentium 4 with everything set up to squeeze the maximum juice out of it. All those "consumer friendly" features mean squat for audio editing and just use up valuable resources, so I made sure they were turned off. By having my latest DAW custom made for audio, I have never had a crash with it and I've been using it to mix multitrack audio with lots of plugins for almost a year.
My advice is to not just buy the cheapest PC available but to go to a company that custom makes PC DAWs. It will still cost far less than a Mac for equivalent power and it will offer at least as good reliability.
That being said, if you're alrady comfortable with Macs, and not with PCs, it might be worth paying extra to not have to learn a new OS.
As for Protools, it appears to be dominant in studios more for legacy reasons than anything else. There is very little that it does that can't be done by other applications, in some cases done even better. That isn't to say that it isn't a good choice for you, just that it isn't necessarily superior for everybody.
Bottom line: Pick the app that you want, then pick the platform that runs it.
And don't worry about the resale value of you hardware. If it's doing it's job right, you'll be holding onto for at least a couple years and at that point, whether it's Mac or PC, it will be worth relatively very little.
My advice is to not just buy the cheapest PC available but to go to a company that custom makes PC DAWs. It will still cost far less than a Mac for equivalent power and it will offer at least as good reliability.
That being said, if you're alrady comfortable with Macs, and not with PCs, it might be worth paying extra to not have to learn a new OS.
As for Protools, it appears to be dominant in studios more for legacy reasons than anything else. There is very little that it does that can't be done by other applications, in some cases done even better. That isn't to say that it isn't a good choice for you, just that it isn't necessarily superior for everybody.
Bottom line: Pick the app that you want, then pick the platform that runs it.
And don't worry about the resale value of you hardware. If it's doing it's job right, you'll be holding onto for at least a couple years and at that point, whether it's Mac or PC, it will be worth relatively very little.
Blisshead said:
Great Idea,
Our office manager at work just reconfigured our computer system in much the same way. We run a big data base program that was getting corrupted all the time. all computers now have two hard drives? and a partition. (I know its more complicated than that) One for the data base and the other for the web, wordprocessing ,etc. The data base side needs to be booted differently and never see's the web. we haven't had a problem since.
I can get her to reconfigure my home system system in much the same way. I'd do it but just trying to send a fax gets my blood pressure up
Great suggestions.Scooperman said:
Having a machine which never touches the Internet is half the battle. It's a pain to have to burn CDs or use firewire drives to shuttle data, but it's more of a pain to have virus problems.
If your machine isn't on the Internet you can disable a lot of services (or daemons, if you're a Mac user) which are needed to access it, which saves you memory and keeps things more stable.
When I built mine I used an MSI motherboard with an Athlon64 processor and made sure to get the exact memory that MSI said would work with it. It's not the most tweaked out box ever, but it's stable and has beat more than one P4 handily. But if you're not into all that and want to use a PC, don't go with a Dell or another large scale consumer manufacturer. They are mostly concerned with the bottom line and will not meet your needs. Find someone like Invalid Link Removed who does DAW machines specifically and you should have no problems on the hardware end.
^^ The last two posts are the other side of my "computing is a subjective experience" theme illustrated rather nicely.
One could set up a home network, wired or unwired to move data for relatively little money (and really easily too!). It's not to bad to move stuff around machine to machine, similar to copying from one folder to another on one machine.msquared said:
Here's a non-musical view on both. I use a PC at work and Mac at home. I have in the past used Mac at work and PC at home. My uses are not audio-related - just email, net, and disseminating digicam pictures. Outside of perhaps doing final recording into the computer for multitrack mixing and mastering, I just refuse to involve a computer in music. OK, hardware sequencers, perhaps. But I digress.
Anyways, I only have one gripe about the newer 1.x gHz iMac I now have at home:
It's trying SO hard to be non-PC-like that some operations become a bit confusing. Ctrl-Alt-Del becomes [this icon]+[that icon]+[Esc], you can't simply minimize all windows to see your desktop, etc.
I've also had some software-specific issues.
I'll cite the following examples, though they may be minor:
- The program to import photos from my camera to the Mac, iPhoto, is useless to me for storing pictures (thanks to the odd Library structure) and is nearly useless for editing as well. I have to import them to iPhoto, and then export them as JPGs to a folder, before I can do anything with them outside of a crop or a redeye correction.
- While we're on the subject of photos, I even *bought* Mac's photo editing software, and it's STILL not as simple and useful as Microsoft Photo Editor. I'm not talking about creating graphics here, I'm just trying to make photos look good. Gimme a Gamma slider anyday.
- None of the web browsers I've used (Currently Firefox, it's great with popup management and such) allow tabbing to dropdown form fields; they always get skipped, so gone are the days of filling out a form without the mouse (which is faster for me).
All in all, I like many things and love some things about my Mac (highest points for not crashing, and autodiscovery/no-driver-loading), but it has its drawbacks. I'm thinking of relegating the iMac to jukebox duty, one of the things it does best, and getting a wireless router and a laptop for doing everything else. I dont know how my girlfriend would feel about that, but she complains about the Mac all the time. (then again, she could just buy her own dang computer)...
Anyways, I only have one gripe about the newer 1.x gHz iMac I now have at home:
It's trying SO hard to be non-PC-like that some operations become a bit confusing. Ctrl-Alt-Del becomes [this icon]+[that icon]+[Esc], you can't simply minimize all windows to see your desktop, etc.
I've also had some software-specific issues.
I'll cite the following examples, though they may be minor:
- The program to import photos from my camera to the Mac, iPhoto, is useless to me for storing pictures (thanks to the odd Library structure) and is nearly useless for editing as well. I have to import them to iPhoto, and then export them as JPGs to a folder, before I can do anything with them outside of a crop or a redeye correction.
- While we're on the subject of photos, I even *bought* Mac's photo editing software, and it's STILL not as simple and useful as Microsoft Photo Editor. I'm not talking about creating graphics here, I'm just trying to make photos look good. Gimme a Gamma slider anyday.
- None of the web browsers I've used (Currently Firefox, it's great with popup management and such) allow tabbing to dropdown form fields; they always get skipped, so gone are the days of filling out a form without the mouse (which is faster for me).
All in all, I like many things and love some things about my Mac (highest points for not crashing, and autodiscovery/no-driver-loading), but it has its drawbacks. I'm thinking of relegating the iMac to jukebox duty, one of the things it does best, and getting a wireless router and a laptop for doing everything else. I dont know how my girlfriend would feel about that, but she complains about the Mac all the time. (then again, she could just buy her own dang computer)...
TO minimize all windows to see the desktop, just hit F11
To make this extra cool, hit shift along with F11.
You can also see all active windows by hitting F10 or F9
It's called Expose I think.
I use Safari, and it has tabs for websites. An auto-complete feature seems to be part of the OS, I use mine all the time to fill in forms. Hmm. . . I don't know where to find it, it just happens on my mac.
LM
To make this extra cool, hit shift along with F11.
You can also see all active windows by hitting F10 or F9
It's called Expose I think.
I use Safari, and it has tabs for websites. An auto-complete feature seems to be part of the OS, I use mine all the time to fill in forms. Hmm. . . I don't know where to find it, it just happens on my mac.
LM
Although it is POSSIBLE to make PCs near a stable as a Mac, it takes a lot of work and knowlage. PCs CAN work. Macs DO work.
Plus in ANY studio you go into, it's always Macs all the way. Sure, it's true, to a degree, that all studios use Macs as a legacy thing. But that ain't gonna change. I mean, Macs have always been (and still are, in my oppinion are still,) the way to go. What are the odds that all pro studios are just going to abandon Pro-Tools and go with some "pc-equivalent," (which is still a statement that brings laughs from any pro producer/engineer I've ever talked to.)
Now, I've been a Mac user since 1984, (and I was born in 1982,) but I've also been working in over-the-phone tech support for a number of years, with PCs exclusively. I actually know PCs far better than I know Macs now. And I'm still gonna say Mac, hands down.
And with the new iMac G5s, it's not even that expensive. I'm hoping to get one, as well as a Digi002. That would be friggin'beautiful.
Plus in ANY studio you go into, it's always Macs all the way. Sure, it's true, to a degree, that all studios use Macs as a legacy thing. But that ain't gonna change. I mean, Macs have always been (and still are, in my oppinion are still,) the way to go. What are the odds that all pro studios are just going to abandon Pro-Tools and go with some "pc-equivalent," (which is still a statement that brings laughs from any pro producer/engineer I've ever talked to.)
Now, I've been a Mac user since 1984, (and I was born in 1982,) but I've also been working in over-the-phone tech support for a number of years, with PCs exclusively. I actually know PCs far better than I know Macs now. And I'm still gonna say Mac, hands down.
And with the new iMac G5s, it's not even that expensive. I'm hoping to get one, as well as a Digi002. That would be friggin'beautiful.
Stevious G said:
Actually, it is changing. Look at Nuendo's, Cubase's and Sonar's ever growing list of users.
-these are the posts that get to me, -the my experience + my opinion = fact posts.
Blisshead said:
Yah but at least he knows from his experience,... he sounds like a person who knows a lot about the MAC and PC not just someone who touched a PC for a day and has made the decision that it is no good.
Personally, I'll have to agree with him that any pro studio that I have been into is running a MAC. But any semi pro musician / DJ / buddy that I've gone over to do some recording have all been done on PCs. Is that because it's easier to change the industry standard when you have beginners? Works for me.
Just for the record, I'm running Cubase on my PC and love it (it's not connected to the internet)
Big Benner said:
The internet connection issue is not a problem for Macs like it is for PCs. I know more than a few pros who use their Macs for surfing and recording. (matt garrison comes to mind) I believe that there is one known virus for the Mac, maybe two?
Much more than legacy, the reason Macs are used in the studios is because they are stable. More stable than anything else out there. Now if you are recording a symphony orchestra on a session that is costing thousands by the hour, what would you use? I have used PCs for years and years and have never seen one as stable as OSX. Perhaps that is changing, but for now, it is a Mac world in the industry.
There are things about PCs that I absolutely love, customizing them for example and certain interface qualities. But for my needs, the Mac is perfect. I still have two PC notebooks sitting right next to me that do nothing but collect dust.
I use Cubase, have my PC connected to net etc. Xp is very stable, but there is a lot of room to screw it up if your not careful. No crashes, no problems for me. I use a Mac (we had a few, but due to cost are down to one), many PC's, a SCO unix server, a Windows server and a bunch of dumb terminals every day at work, (though they are downsizing our office, so not for much longer!). -I have for the last seven years.Big Benner said:
Re: the slow change thing, I think your right, that is how PC recording will advance, though paging through the Steinberg and Cakewalk sites will show you that some big names are using these products as well.
[Invalid or Expired Link Removed]
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/computer-virus/macintosh-faq/Davehenning said:
-do you have any proof to offer re: the 'more stable than anything..." comment?
edit: I realized I'm repeating myself, so I'm going to bow out. I think most people will do some research anyway and not just except off the cuff statements as fact.
Blisshead said:
The proof is in my experience in professional situations. If you can convince some of the top engineers in the biz to switch, then I'd be impressed.
Macs also do not need the constant babysitting that PCs do. Sorry, my bad, approx 40 Mac viruses as opposed to how many thousands of PC ones?
Blisshead said:
OS X has 0 Viruses.*
OS 9 had about 40, compared to roughly 30-40 Thousand (including variants) on windows, which is more manageable? which do you have to worry about more? My brother uses windows masterfully(as well as being very competent on OS X), he runs a tight ship so to speak, yet, whenever my little brother uses his computer, it gets a virus, I'm not even kidding. Right now it has 2 or 3 critical viruses that can't be removed.
There are Windows Viruses that can rest on macs and then subsequently be seeded from the mac to windows based PCs, which is why it's still a good idea to keep anti-virus software around, to be a good neighbor.
* There have been 2 non malicious 'proof-of-concept' trojans, but they never really went anywhere other than talk in a lab
