Should I switch from Sonar to a Mac?

[synthwave100]

I have a Dell P4 at 2.26 GHz with 512 MB of ram, Sonar 2.0, an Aardvark 24/96, and a bunch of Steinberg VST's. I am fed up with the instability of my system and the fact that I sometimes have to restart my entire system five times in half an hour. A couple of months ago I followed Sweetwater.com's directions for making XP more "music friendly", and although that helped for a while, lately the computer has been acting up again.

I have heard that although they are not faster, Macs are more reliable and do not need to be restarted nearly as often as PC's. Is this true?...I can live with waiting a little for soft synth to load, but I don't like having my computer go out on me when I'm in the middle of an idea.

Also, whatever computer I get next will be a laptop, so are the Apple Power books up to the job of music?

And finally, if I decide to make the switch, what sequencer should I get to replace Sonar?

I should also mention that price is not really a factor and whatever laptop I get will be the best of its kind so it will last a couple of years.

I'd appreciate any advice,

-Andrew

 

[Jim Y]

This isn't a P4 HyperThreading (HT) issue is it? Some VSTs don't like it but most have now been updated.
If you go to a Mac, what software would you run? Personally, I would hate to have to face SX or Logic after using Sonar, although there are Digital Performer and ProTools I suppose.

 

[brzilian]

Here we go again...

A Mac is just as prone to crashing as a PC. Anybody who tells you otherwise if full of it.

 

[elevate]

I should also mention that price is not really a factor and whatever laptop I get will be the best of its kind so it will last a couple of years.

Currently, Apple's laptops are severely underpowered compared to x86 offerings. The Pentium M gives excellent battery life and has performance that belies its clock speed. You can also get x86 laptops with desktop Pentium 4s in them for desktop speed on the go. Until IBM figures out how to make the 970s at 90nm, I couldn't justify spending Powerbook-level money and getting the current level of performance. YMMV.

 

[DAFFYDRUNK]

If you are rebooting that much, you have problems with your computer. Could be lots of things, but a properly running PC shouldn't really have any problems. Could be tons of reasons why it crashes, like being a Dell spyware/virus probs, bad drivers, heat issues, ect...

 

[brzilian]

If you are rebooting that much, you have problems with your computer. Could be lots of things, but a properly running PC shouldn't really have any problems. Could be tons of reasons why it crashes, like being a Dell spyware/virus probs, bad drivers, heat issues, ect...

Good point. Judging by the fact its a P4-2.26, I'm guessing its a couple years old. It might be time to wipe the HD clean and reinstall everything. I do that at least once a year.

 

[Hard2Hear]

I agree with brzillian et al.

In fact, I used Sonar1XL on a P3 733 with 768 MB of ram and 7200RPM HD's and got 32 tracks all day with plugins and eq. I never had a problem with it, I was running on Win2000. Just had to watch the reverb and the waves (resource hog) plugins. But I still used them, just watched them closely.

H2H

 

[Hard2Hear]

Oh, and I used a mac in one studio running Digital Performer that would lock up at least 5 times a day during sessions. I made the studio owner buy a new one so we could complete that record.

H2H

 

[earthcub]

Hey,
I thought I'd chime in a bit since I WAS a Sonar user. I got up to v.2 and gave it up. I had so many stability problems with it that I thought I might shoot myself. I also had very difficult problems with the support team. They were really less than helpful at trying to resolve my problems. I'm really amazed to hear the Hard2Hear has had such great success. My system is a 1.8 Ghz with a Asus P4T-E using Rambus RAM at a gig on Win2K and a Delta44. I'm not convinced that that Delta drivers weren't the cause of some of my frustration.

I upgraded to XP, ditched Sonar and went to Cubase. I love it. There are some issues at times with trying to do too much too fast, but I never lock up and thing runs like a dream. I still have CPU issues with Sampletank2 and sometimes it likes to hog all my RAM. I think they still have issues to hammer out. I re-installed Sonar on XP to see if it ran better. Nope, still sucked. Now, don't get me wrong, I really like Sonar, and I've played a little with the new engine in 3.0. But after using Cubase, I realized that aside from the MIDI implementation which is stronger in Sonar, Sonar is really just trying to keep up with Cubase as far as its plug-in offerings, eq integration, system stability, and sound engine. Sonar also has much better BUS management IMHO.

Now, one of the reasons I chose Cubase is that I've also waffled back and forth a bit about switching over to the Mac. I haven't because the pricing is so high on their machines. But, I like to keep the option open so I'm now taking a bent where I will only buy something that's OS agnostic. Everything you buy should have at least two installs per license so that you can run it on both Mac and/or PC or else I won't buy it. It just makes sense.

I just borrowed a Mac from a friend and installed Cubase, Sampletank and Absynth on it and started futzing around to see how I liked it and I'm still leaning toward the PC for pricing and controls. I still like the way that Windows is layed out, but I'm also a developer and my tools of choice are on the PC, so I'm a little biased. I find it hard to keep productivity up when I can't do something at the blink of an eye... but having said that, having UNIX with such a beautiful graphical front end like OS X makes me kinda wet. Maybe one day, but not quite yet.

Peace