What is a iMAC like for a DAW?

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the-audio-man

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Hi guys,

Forgive my mac arrogance as I am and always have been a PC user. I really like the iMacs, they look great and are very compact which appeals to me.

I do smaller production work for bands and myself and I have a small studio set up for this sort of thing.

My current PC is a 3.0ghz Core 2 Duo/4gb ram/xp/2x1tb hard drives etc The mainboard on this unit has decided to die for whatever reason and lately, I have been thinking about going over to mac.

Macs dedicated silver box is something like $4grand here in Australia and I can't justify that right now because replacing the mainboard is cheaper.

My main question after this ramble is this - has anyone used Logic on an iMac and how would it perform with up to a full 3 or 4 songs in a single session (i mean that in regards to 1 song = 15 tracks or so)? I would by the 3.0ghz mac with the nice big screen if I was to convert over. Garage band is not an option for me, I need to be able to record at least 16 live tracks, run plugins, mix down and produce. Are the iMacs just pretty or can they actually move information around and do it well?

thanks again mac users ;)
 
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I haven't ever tried audio on an iMac (though I have one at work); I mostly do my audio work on an old quad G5. The iMac ought to be about the same as any comparably fast PC (Core 2 Duo @3GHz-ish) for audio purposes. It is, after all, pretty similar hardware, EFI vs. BIOS and a few other minor differences notwithstanding.

Not sure what you're planning to use for software, but my biggest piece of advice would be to avoid Cubase and family on the Mac side and go with either Logic (Apple) or Digital Performer (MOTU).

What sort of audio interface are you using?
 
Dont forget the iMac is really a laptop in LCD monitor clothing. So all the limitations of any laptop come with an iMac. It uses a laptop processor and not a full on desktop processor, laptop sodimms which are slower speed, and laptop bussing architecture. If you have a C2D desktop, it will be a step down in performance.

And I'm not Apple Bashing. I'm an Apple VAR for Pro Audio and Video Editing.
 
Hard2Hear said:
Dont forget the iMac is really a laptop in LCD monitor clothing.
Click to expand...

Hmph. You're right. It's an X9100. I did not know that.... My bad.

That said, if these benchmarks are correct, whether that is faster or slower than a desktop CPU depends on which desktop CPU, even at the same clock speed:

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core2+Extreme+X9100+@+3.06GHz

Because performance can be such an application-dependent metric, it's hard to give a definitive answer on performance comparisons between two CPUs, but hopefully that link will give you a ballpark of what to expect. Unfortunately, I have no idea what chipset those benchmarks were run on, which can often make a big difference in performance.

Either way, I can't imagine the iMac not being able to handle 16 channel recording with MOTU interfaces. My quad G5 could do that without breaking a sweat. *shrugs*
 
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the-audio-man said:
...Are the iMacs just pretty or can they actually move information around and do it well?...
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Hey the-audio-man,

I'm not sure where things stand now for you, or if you've gotten all the answers to your questions. If you're still researching, you might be interested in reading what people had to say at these threads at the MacForums message board...

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/music-audio-podcasting/144718-what-mac-music-production.html

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/mu...009-mac-mini-imac-audio-recording-mixing.html

In one of the threads I had posted a question about whether or not a MacMini or iMac could handle audio work. I'm just a home hobbyist noob. After reading and researching I'm sure an iMac would be plenty sufficient for me. I can't say how it would work out for your needs though.

Let us know what you decide, (or decided), and how it's going, if you don't mind.

Good luck!
- LB
 
iMacs can do a fine job as an audio machine and MOTU place very nice with them

One thing I have found is that many of the people I know using them are using external firewire HDDs as dedicated recording drives since you can't add drives internally and generally if you're serious about audio you want to record (write) to a separate drive to avoid pop ands clicks that can occur if your trying to write to a drive at the same time that the OS or application is trying to read from it

The laptop C2 Duo and lack of a quad core option at present is only really problematic if you are using a lot of CPU heavy plugins (such as multiple instances ofconvolution reverbs etc)
 
Bristol Posse said:
iMacs can do a fine job as an audio machine and MOTU place very nice with them
Click to expand...
Awesome! I'll have to check out MOTU's interfaces. I hear Logic is fairly MIDI-centric, and MOTU makes great MIDI stuff.

Bristol Posse said:
One thing I have found is that many of the people I know using them are using external firewire HDDs as dedicated recording drives...
Click to expand...
This is true. Someone on the Roland V-Drums forum recommended one of the OWC Mercury Elite external hard drives to me for Mac use. It's here if anyone wants to check it out...

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MAU4S7750H32/

The above drive is a firewire 400 unit. So you'd need a 400-800 firewire cable for a new iMac. Or you could get one of their 800/400 units for a little bit extra.
 
Bristol Posse said:
One thing I have found is that many of the people I know using them are using external firewire HDDs as dedicated recording drives since you can't add drives internally and generally if you're serious about audio you want to record (write) to a separate drive to avoid pop ands clicks that can occur if your trying to write to a drive at the same time that the OS or application is trying to read from it
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Computers don't generally work that way. When you're in a DAW app, all the pages of memory that are going to get used are likely to be paged in because the software is going to be hammering on them. If you're so RAM-starved that they get paged out and have to be read in again, you're already so screwed performance-wise that having your audio data on a separate drive isn't going to help you.

Worse, an external drive has much higher read latency than an internal drive, and if your computer is already short on buffer RAM, having to read farther ahead to get the data into the machine on schedule is just going to make matters worse. The result is that you are significantly more likely to get glitches and dropouts with even the fastest FireWire 800 drive than you are with any internal drive, including an internal laptop drive. The only external drive technology that does not have this problem is eSATA.

Keeping data on one drive made a lot of sense back when hard drives could barely keep up with the data rate. These days, the data rate of a typical SATA HD will handle on the order of 128 simultaneous tracks (reading) at 24-bit 192 kHz (or 256 @ 24/96 or 512 at 24/48 or...). You're just not going to run into a brick wall on I/O performance, or at least you shouldn't.

The only reason I can think of to keep data on a different disk is ease of backups, and only then if you aren't using Time Machine for your backups. IMHO, you're much better off keeping your audio files on your system drive and getting a big FireWire drive for use as a time machine backup drive. Given the number of hard drives I've lost in the last year, I can honestly say that all hard drives suck horribly, and you should not even think about using any modern HD without a backup.
 
dgatwood said:
Computers don't generally work that way. When you're in a DAW app, all the pages of memory that are going to get used are likely to be paged in because the software is going to be hammering on them. If you're so RAM-starved that they get paged out and have to be read in again, you're already so screwed performance-wise that having your audio data on a separate drive isn't going to help you.

Worse, an external drive has much higher read latency than an internal drive, and if your computer is already short on buffer RAM, having to read farther ahead to get the data into the machine on schedule is just going to make matters worse. The result is that you are significantly more likely to get glitches and dropouts with even the fastest FireWire 800 drive than you are with any internal drive, including an internal laptop drive. The only external drive technology that does not have this problem is eSATA.

Keeping data on one drive made a lot of sense back when hard drives could barely keep up with the data rate. These days, the data rate of a typical SATA HD will handle on the order of 128 simultaneous tracks (reading) at 24-bit 192 kHz (or 256 @ 24/96 or 512 at 24/48 or...). You're just not going to run into a brick wall on I/O performance, or at least you shouldn't.

The only reason I can think of to keep data on a different disk is ease of backups, and only then if you aren't using Time Machine for your backups. IMHO, you're much better off keeping your audio files on your system drive and getting a big FireWire drive for use as a time machine backup drive. Given the number of hard drives I've lost in the last year, I can honestly say that all hard drives suck horribly, and you should not even think about using any modern HD without a backup.
Click to expand...


Agreed the Daw will pre load most of what it needs and the only thing the DAW should be writing is your Data any way

However...
most people would rather not take the chance that itunes, Java, Apple updater, or the OS itself won't decide the middle of your recording session isn't the perfect time to do some background operations or download updates etc. HDDs have taken big strides but can still only perform one operation at a time (ie can't perform a read operation and a write operation simultaneoulsy) and that's why most people are using a separate audio drive
 
Bristol Posse said:
However...
most people would rather not take the chance that itunes, Java, Apple updater, or the OS itself won't decide the middle of your recording session isn't the perfect time to do some background operations or download updates etc.
Click to expand...

Most background operations happen on your external drive, too. The most likely background operation to interfere (by orders of magnitude) is Spotlight, which indexes all volumes, not just the startup volume.

If Software Update pops up its window, unless you have a lot of RAM, it will likely cause your recording to glitch even on a different drive due to paging. Even if you do have enough RAM, you'll end up moving huge amounts of data with the CPU to handle the window refreshes, etc., and this has a good chance of causing a glitch.

Java doesn't do anything unless you run a Java app, so I don't quite understand why that was mentioned.

The only way iTunes would do anything in the background would be if you have an iPod or iPhone attached. Otherwise, it only does anything when you click.


Bristol Posse said:
HDDs have taken big strides but can still only perform one operation at a time (ie can't perform a read operation and a write operation simultaneoulsy) and that's why most people are using a separate audio drive
Click to expand...

Hard drives very rapidly switch from one operation to another, and because of the way the buffer cache works, within a given track, they effectively do perform two operations at a time; a read operation can be being read out of the cache while recently written data is being flushed out to the mechanism.... It's just not a big concern....
 
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