charlie2 wrote: ↑Tue May 12, 2020 6:23 am
I'm being pulled in 3 different directions.
Someone here turned me on to studiocat purrrfect audio. Impressive stuff.
The pro tools computer is good too.
Then theres adk audio using both amd and intel. Also impressive. I'm reading conflicting opinions about amd vs intels.
Then my people here in new york pulling toward a mac.
The concern w mac is losing some of my pc files as I switch over but they swear by it.
Your ideas and experience are appreciated. I just wanna get back to composing but I gonna make some decision. Thanx
Jim Roseberry, the guy behind Studio Cat (and Purrfect Audio), has been a long-time music PC builder, and is still very active in music technology forums like the Cakewalk by BandLab forum (see a list of his posts there at
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php? ... activity=1). In fact, his latest response (as of the moment) is in a thread on the AMD versus Intel question (at
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php? ... -or-intel/). I didn't read that thread, so I have no idea what the consensus, if any is -- that sometimes seems to be as religious a war as Macs versus PCs. However, I did read one link in the index of Jim's responses (
https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php? ... ent-125825) where he seems to be making a case for Intel in one specific comparison case, being very detailed about issues.
ADK is also a pretty well-respected music computer builder. I believe Cakewalk was joint marketing their PCs at some point in the past, but that would have been at least a few years back. (They also used to have relationships with other music software vendors where you could buy certain products off their website. I don't recall if you could do that with the PCs, though. Of course, Cakewalk, as a company, is no more, but Cakewalk by BandLab is still a highly respectable DAW, not to mention free!) I have no experience with them, or, to the best of my knowledge, anyone who works for them.
I won't weigh in on the general AMD versus Intel battle. I will, however, say that I've had at least 2 AMD PCs over the years, one off the shelf and at least one I built myself. The off-the-shelf one was a total dog, with huge incompatibilities, a limited configuration, and horrible reliability. The one remember for sure I built myself, based on a configuration recommended by another music PC builder whose name I can't recall (I just know his recommendation was one a lot of people were using at the time.) It was way better than the off-the-shelf one, but I also had a lot of reliability problems with it. The bottom line for me, was that, after the most recent time with an AMD (and having previously had really good experiences with Intel-based systems), I vowed to stick with Intel from that point on. I know it had to have been a long time ago because my last two PCs, both of which I built myself, have (thus far) gotten me through over a decade of music making (and other) service. In fact, the predecessor to my current system still works, and is even running Windows 10, though its being a Core 2 Duo makes it way too limited for modern plugins, so it really just sits in a spare bedroom "in case" (though, now that I have a more powerful laptop, in addition to my main tower PC, I haven't used that system in ages).
As for Windows versus Mac, I'm a long-time Windows guy and really not a fan of Apple's model, which is basically locking you into their way of doing things. I think I already replied in more detail on another recent thread in this forum. I do know lots of music people use Macs, but lots use PCs, too.
Rick