Mac vs. PC ?

[Turkey]

Does anyone have any opinions on which way to go?

I've heard many horror stories about PC's and crashin and losing songs and just unforseen downtime. Mind you, this was a few years ago and I've been out of the loop for awhile.

Do any of you PC users come across problems that stop you from recording because you've gotta figure out what the hell went wrong? Bugs etc?

From what I hear Mac's are the power horses. Made only by one company. Macintosh.

PC's are made by numerous companies and have numerous progammers working for them. (creating numerous problems?)

What about the Mac users, any comments?

Just a question that would be interesting to get opinions towards.

 

[therage!]

Been discussed a BILLION times.

If you have money to burn on a stupid tool like a computer then maybe Mac is the way to go. Others will take the chunk of money saved by going with a PC and use it for recording gear.

Computers are only tools...like hammers. Focus more on quality recording gear that actually has an affect on your sound.

 

[bigwillz24]

IMO With proper configuration a PC is just as stable as a Mac.

Try searching this here I think there may be a few thousand threads on this same issue.

 

[MichaelM]

You have a lot more flexibility with hardware and software choices with the PC - You can build whatever you want for usually less than buying an Apple. If you're after a dedicated recording computer, a properly configured PC with correct, uptodate drivers will be quite stable. But yeah, this has been discussed heaps of times before.

 

[Cloneboy Studio]

I've had bad experiences with BOTH platforms. On PC's you have the advantage of tons of cheap/free software and cheaper hardware, unfortunately you have a lot of driver issues, compatibility issues, reliability issues, and the fact that Windows OS's hog your resources to the point of stupidity. On the Macs the OS runs great and smoothly, but their hardware is crappy and unreliable, and pricey. I had TWO Macs, a G3 and a G4, die on me within a six month time period... which swore me off on computers being a valid musical tool.

So my opinion is NEITHER if you can help it. Get dedicated hardware if you can--the more the better. My life became incredibly uncomplicated once I moved off the computer....

 

[MichaelM]

Yeah but - get proper drivers and set up windoze so it doesn't waste all your resources on an animating start menu, and unless you want to reformat every 6 months or so keep it away from the net... You have a very flexible medium with which to record. I hate using my computer for levels and eq - I go back out to my Behringer mixer for mixdown. Yeah I know it probably has crappy preamps and eq section but I get a lot more feel for the music that way, but subgroups and effects and automation is great in Sonar (or whatever).

 

[manning1]

turkey. i'm a computer engr. i'm now using this word instead of puter
because a member on here doesnt like me using puter.
anyway ....i dont want a mac/pc war....but us REAL COMPUTER engrs , not somebody whose built a few pc's and think they are an information tech expert are very excited about the amd 64 for the pc.
just read teachers post about the great performance of his amd 64 he posted awhile back if you dont believe me.

a lot of the BS you hear about pc's is just that BS.
do your own research because i'm too tired of it all.

 

[warble]

The REAL computer engineer has spoken. Now for the simple man's opinion

Turkey: for what it's worth (I'm not a computer engineer), PC's can work just fine as DAW's. I built my own DAW (with a lot of great info and tips from this site - before the computer engineer came along) and it's been working great. I'm running an AMD Athlon 2100+, 1 gig ram, Windows XP Pro, and Cubase SX as my main recording software. It took same trial and error, but I've managed to get a decent machine running here for audio work. I won't argue the PC vs. Mac thing. I'm just offering my opinion and I think you'd do very well with a PC. There are a couple sites I know of that offer great tips for tweaking PC's for audio recording use - which will alleviate the apparent resource problem that people are stating. Any problems I've seem to come across in the whole process, were mostly software related. I've got Windows XP Pro running very stable and I've had a couple glitches with my recording software. I also keep all my drivers up to date, and keep all my software updated. I haven't been into computers for ions, but I've managed to build some decent PC's.

You'll find a wealth of knowledge here and all this. Can't search here for a bit, but if it does again become available, I'd search for tips on PC configurations. The new AMD's (AMD 64) which the computer engineer mentioned, are getting a lot of good press. There are people using them here and they are all giddy about it. I would be too.

Good luck and happy recording which ever way you decide to go.

P.S. Mac are made by Apple.

 

[xtjdx]

I'm running an Athlon 64 3400+ system and it blows most Mac systems out of the water in terms of performance and reliability. Mac has all those "pretty" graphics that take up all that CPU time which in turn takes away from DSP power. Before this, I was running a PIII 1ghz system, and it still outperformed most Mac systems that I've seen. In my opinion, Macs are EXTREMELY overrated. And the Athlon 64 has a great memory architecture (the northbridge is on the chip! Win!). And for the price (under $300 for this CPU) you really can't go wrong. Plus, if you're thinking of going G5, you'll have to make sure that the hardware supports PCI-X (this was a huge issue for a lot of M-Audio customers). Overall, I'd say that PCs give you a lot more options and flexibility and even though new-gen Mac OSs are based on Unix kernel, a PC can be just as stable - if not more.

 

[manning1]

xtj. well done. any performance stats ? max tracks ?
what mainboard you running ?

 

[xtjdx]

I haven't really benchmarked this machine much - I figure that if it performs quickly on the front-end, it's got to be doing well on the back-end also.
The most tracks I've ran was 48 tracks with at least two VST plugins on each. 18 MIDI tracks, 30 stereo audio tracks. Once I popped that 49th track on, I started getting artifacts and figured that was my limit. However, I restarted Cubase and reloaded the project. To my surprise the clicks were gone. On adding another plugin, they came back. But I think that's pretty impressive. Just wait, once I add another gig of ram in I'll probably be at around 60 max tracks. It's exciting.
I am running a Soltek K8AN2E-GR motherboard. It's rock solid and under $100. There isn't all that much room for overclocking, but you can if you want to (the most I've gotten it up to was 2.67 GHz from 2.4). This system has been running amazingly for about two months now (even after a near catastrophic bent CPU pin incident). Now all I need is a better cooling solution (I am working on designing a silent water cooling block and rackmount radiator).

 

[manning1]

xtj. excellent. you know your stuff.
you probably know this , but just a word of warning.
because people are spending so much on the 64 processor they often skimp on the power supply. to save bucks. also be wary of some clone power supplies around. although they say they are rated to a certain power spec, some are operating under spec. ie; not meeting rated wattage spec. just be aware of this gotcha and overrate the power supply. it'll save you potential system probs down the road.
are you operating 8 mb cache drives ? two drives ?
for a laugh if you get a chance run diskbench from prorec.com on your system. just curious what it shows as max track count and drive thruput on your 64. did you get the new 939 processor or the old one ?

 

[xtjdx]

480 watt power supply, I'm set for awhile.
I opted for the 754, mainly because there's not a huge difference between it and the 939 (if I wanted a 939 equivalent, I would of just gotten a clawhammer core. Unless you're benchmarking, there's not going to be a lot of difference. Now, if the 939 had HT, that'd be a different story).
I am only using one SATA drive, 8 MB cache. Soon I will be upgrading to a RAID 5 or 10 array (I have been putting that off for a long long time and fault tolerance is definitely something I need to address). I'll get that benchmark going after I finish these tracks.

 

[Ronan]

If price is your only concern buy a PC. For any other reason buy a mac.

Let me put it to you this way: I used to work at Microsoft at the main campus in Redmond, WA. Every audio studio in the building was equiped with a Mac and almost all serious audio work was done on the Mac. We used the PC for email.

 

[xtjdx]

DskBench 2.11
(c) 1998, SESA, J.M.Catena (admin@sesa.es, www.sesa.es)
Timer Check = 1000 (should be near 1000)
CPU Check = 49.95 % (should be near 50.00 %)
CPU index (relative to Pro 200 MHz) = 12.548695
Open = 0 ms
Write = 4843 ms, 52.86 MB/s, CPU = 1.49 %
Flush = 0 ms
Rewin = 0 ms
Read = 4938 ms, 51.84 MB/s, CPU = 0.93 %
Close = 0 ms
BlockSize = 131072, MB/s = 12.45, Tracks = 148.02, CPU = 0.22 %
BlockSize = 65536, MB/s = 7.54, Tracks = 89.68, CPU = 0.11 %
BlockSize = 32768, MB/s = 4.23, Tracks = 50.31, CPU = 0.13 %
BlockSize = 16384, MB/s = 19.23, Tracks = 228.63, CPU = 2.50 %
BlockSize = 8192, MB/s = 15.85, Tracks = 188.38, CPU = 4.16 %
BlockSize = 4096, MB/s = 11.46, Tracks = 136.21, CPU = 5.98 %

I'm not sure why the CPU utilization was so high. Nothing else should of been trying to access the disk and I terminated most apps. Oh well, it still runs quick.

OH, and Ronan, you know the Windows 2000 startup WAV? Every time I hear it, it sounds like there's a bump or a person making a sound somewhere in there. Is that my ears playing tricks on me?

 

[Cloneboy Studio]

It's amazing how few big studios use computers for recording though.... Unless it's tied into a godawful Pro-Tools system.

 

[xtjdx]

Well, if you already have some of the equipment, might as well work with what you've got and save some money. I really want to get into analog or at least non-DAW based recording, but right now money doesn't come close to permitting. Someday. Until then, a DAW is a cheap(er) and easy solution.

 

[Cloneboy Studio]

A crappy computer DAW is cheaper, but one that is any good costs about as much as the hardware if you know what used gear to buy.

 

[manning1]

xtdj. very very nice. notice your timer is spot on.
also nice high disk transfer speeds.
it doesnt get much better than this.

cloneboy. with respect...daw computers are not crappy.
i disagree with you. the reason a lot of big studios
had not used computers exclusively up till now was the
high track counts they needed. products like the 64 and opterons were not available.

 

[Cloneboy Studio]

Personally my opinion is if you are working with paying clients they don't want the inevitable downtime a computer based system will have.

I prefer hardware, you don't have to baby it or configure it's OS.