ibook g4

  • Thread starter Thread starter onmoris
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onmoris

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I know these machines are no longer current, but I'm in need of a mobile recording setup ASAP and from what I'm told cubase won't be ready for the new macs until the end of the year (before anyone suggests it i'm not buying a new laptop and paying full price for new software).

Anyway i was curious if anyone has had any experience tracking with an ibook G4. what was performance like? what kind of latency? how many tracks were you able to get with it?

i'd appreciate any thoughts
thanks
 
I used one as a DTE (video recorder) and it needed a RAM upgrade but worked pretty well... however don't hotplug firewire stuff with it as it will fry the system board.
 
onmoris said:
I know these machines are no longer current, but I'm in need of a mobile recording setup ASAP and from what I'm told cubase won't be ready for the new macs until the end of the year (before anyone suggests it i'm not buying a new laptop and paying full price for new software).

Anyway i was curious if anyone has had any experience tracking with an ibook G4. what was performance like? what kind of latency? how many tracks were you able to get with it?

i'd appreciate any thoughts
thanks
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Why not buy a Windows Laptop system instead if you are that desperate? Cubase ships with both versions on the installation media.

Everybody uses Core 2 Duo processors now so you are on a level playing field.
 
Everybody uses Core 2 Duo processors now so you are on a level playing field.
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no laptops based on core 2 yet

Cubase ships with both versions on the installation media.
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Ships with PPC and windows versions, not a UB, which is due end of this year

What he could do is get a Macbook and run windows on it
 
oop.

I stand corrected

If they are out, then thats the way to go
 
my understanding was that running cubase with bootcamp until the UB cubase comes out would be a very slow situation...

though i'm starting to think it would be worth it to get a macbook and pay 75 bucks to upgrade my protools and do this gig in PT...
 
onmoris said:
my understanding was that running cubase with bootcamp until the UB cubase comes out would be a very slow situation...

though i'm starting to think it would be worth it to get a macbook and pay 75 bucks to upgrade my protools and do this gig in PT...
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No, running it though the emulator (PPC to Intel) is slow and bad, running off of windows via bootcamp is fine since it just becomes a windows machine.
 
Wouldn't there still be possible driver issues with Bootcamp?
 
i dont see why. its just a boot loader and the macbooks are all intel hardware inside
 
altitude909 said:
No, running it though the emulator (PPC to Intel) is slow and bad, running off of windows via bootcamp is fine since it just becomes a windows machine.
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http://www.macintouch.com/reviews/macpro/followup.html
"We used Boot Camp to install Windows XP Home Edition (service pack 2) on our test Mac Pro. Compatibility appears good in our limited testing; the Mac was indistinguishable from any other Windows machine...

...except it was slow. Very, very slow. For example, the Kaleidoscope Photoshop test that took 20 to 30 seconds on our other machines (including a Dell 9150) took over five minutes in Boot Camp Windows!

Some research quickly turned up Boot Camp's Achilles heel: hard drive access. Windows XP does not support the modern EFI firmware used in Apple's Mac Pro, only Windows' twenty year old BIOS system. (Microsoft's latest Vista beta doesn't support EFI, either.) So, Apple wrote a compatibility layer for EFI to emulate a BIOS - the "Compatibility Support Module". The Mac Pro hardware implements very high performance disk modes known as AHCI and NCQ, but Boot Camp's BIOS emulator doesn't put the disks into this mode, instead using an older, slower mode that omits AHCI, NCQ or even direct memory access mode. This effectively cripples Boot Camp's performance."
 
Some research quickly turned up Boot Camp's Achilles heel: hard drive access. Windows XP does not support the modern EFI firmware used in Apple's Mac Pro, only Windows' twenty year old BIOS system. (Microsoft's latest Vista beta doesn't support EFI, either.) So, Apple wrote a compatibility layer for EFI to emulate a BIOS - the "Compatibility Support Module". The Mac Pro hardware implements very high performance disk modes known as AHCI and NCQ, but Boot Camp's BIOS emulator doesn't put the disks into this mode, instead using an older, slower mode that omits AHCI, NCQ or even direct memory access mode. This effectively cripples Boot Camp's performance."
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figures.

thats why i dont touch a mac
 
zekthedeadcow said:
I used one as a DTE (video recorder) and it needed a RAM upgrade but worked pretty well... however don't hotplug firewire stuff with it as it will fry the system board.
Click to expand...

That's only true for the very first generation of iBooks (the first 500/600 MHz run) according to multiple sources online. The newer ones reportedly have additional ESD protection to prevent this.
 
altitude909 said:
figures.

thats why i dont touch a mac
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Dude... Boot Camp is still in beta. Have you tried a Windows beta lately? :D
 
Have you tried a Windows beta lately?
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Hell no. dont touch a new windows version until the first SP.

However apple is advertising that macs now run windows on TV so you would figure that it was done and functional
 
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