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Is a new i mac enough to do any compositional work that comes my way?

I was looking at mac pros and I macs.

The i mac has the newer processor. 2.8. The mac pro was a 2.66

They both had enough ram. The only difference is the imac had external hard drives. The mac pro had the same amount of hard drives but they were all internal.

I was told that it's better to have external hard drives since I'll be using them to hold my huge east west samples. Is this true?

moneywise, the imac looked good....but is it?

Thanks for your help

Internal/external drives don't make much difference; just a question of form factor, there. The real issue is how fast are the drives? RPM, (at least 7200, 10,000 is better) throughput, and avg. seek time are the specs that matter. FireWire 400, 800, USB, eSATA are drive types and are also important; eSATA is usually fastest. (followed by 800FW, 400FW and USB in descending order, but there are some very fast new USB drives in the pipeline)

Whether an iMac can handle anything that comes your way depends on how you work, and what comes your way, heh. If you intend to do vast orchestral mockups, you'd be way better off with a Mac Pro, cuz it's not really about processor speed so much as the number of processor cores, RAM and hard drive speed when you're running a ton of virtual instruments.

If you are going to be doing very large orchestral mockups and you need to get the work done fast (like overnight, for instance), then you'd need multiple computers networked, or one kick ass 64 bit machine with tons of RAM, but currently Mac OS doesn't do 64 bit on all software. To do big projects like that, you need to have a template loaded and ready to go, you won't be able to afford the time to bounce tracks and turn off VIs, etc., to free up CPU. You need to have a lot of orchestral sounds available at all times to do that type of work, many Gs of sounds loaded into RAM spread across two or 3 computers (the big time film guys have several computers running at all times).

But if you're going to be doing more modest types of things, at least to start with, then an iMac will probably do fine.

As mojo mentioned, RAM and hard drive speed are critical to getting the most out of any computer. I don't necessarily think that external drives are better, in fact, internal drives are connected straight to the internal SATA bus, which is faster than FW 800. I have 4 1T drives in my Mac Pro, one is dedicated to the OS and applications, one to my audio projects, and two to samples. You could do the same with external drives, but you can't add internal drives to an iMac.

Make sure that you have enough bandwidth on your FW bus, because you'll be running a FW audio interface, probably. I'm not sure how FW 800 plays with having drives and audio interfaces on the same bus, it used to be somewhat problematic with FW 400 with certain interfaces. I've not really used FW much for my main machine, I use PCI card based audio interfaces, I've always found those to be more robust and trouble free, but that's just my experience. Of course, you can't do a PCI based interface with an iMac.

Overall, the iMac is a very good machine, and you will get a lot of work done with it. Will it handle every job? Well, no, not if it's a job that requires a huge template and a fast turnaround, but you may not be at that point in your composing career anyway, so it may not make a difference right now.

Spend the dough on RAM and drives, no matter what machine you get. And make sure your interface will play nice with your drives.

HTH,

Mazz

Take this the right way but if you want to be a pro, well, go pro.
If you're serious about your music plans and want to make a living of it, invest in the best.

I started to use Mac 6 years ago, bought a mirrored door drive G4. Dual.
It wasn't enough so I bought an iMac Intel dual core 2.4 with 4 gig ram.
It wasn't enough either.
-Now I use Mac Pro 8core 2.8 with 16 gig of ram and 4 internal hard drives.

I haven't had any problems with this machine whatsoever!
It runs smoothly, no need to freeze tracks.

I can run up to 30 channels of software programs without experience any problems.
I use East West Platinum orchestra, Miroslav, Goliath, RA, VSL via Kontakt 4, White Grand,
NI programs, Omnisphere, EZ drummer, Superior drummer.

Works excellent! DAW: Logic 9 and OS: 10.5.8

Thanks for asking the question. I found all the comments very interesting.

Well, given Orest's response and Mazz's and others, here's my plan:

I've done fine orchestral mockups using 3-4 PCs, samplers, modules etc. for sample playback, using an old Mac G4 running Digital Performer. My VisionDAW is optimized for EW Gold, and I can run 64 instruments on that, no problem.

But I'm talking sequencing! Some people say that's akin to a Word program, because obviously you're not recording all the 90+ instruments that I use to do a full orchestral work.

That said, I'm thinking about an iMac myself as the "brains" of the studio to take over for the G4. Why? Because, sometimes I record audio tracks as well. Not many more than about 8 or so to sync with the sequences. --- If my crappy ProTools PC (P4, 2 gig RAM) can do that, why shouldn't a $1200 iMac be alot better at that? Much faster, more RAM, and a MAC! Sure, I'd like Orest's setup, but many of us can't afford that until we're rich and famous like Orest --- Just joking, my friend!

I've spoken with many techies about my situation, and they say "Why not a Mac Mini w/4 gig Ram?" But I still am thinking iMac.

Any more ideas are welcome, because I'm in the same boat as Charlie.

Ern

ernstinen wrote: But I'm talking sequencing! Some people say that's akin to a Word program, because obviously you're not recording all the 90+ instruments that I use to do a full orchestral work.

I'm going to presume you meant that you're not recording 90+ instruments/streams to separate tracks. A Mac Mini might make sense if you're sequencing with Logic; it has distributed processing, you could add more Minis incrementally, to a point where you could easily record/playback that many tracks, or more, no ProTools required. A Quad Mac Pro with 8 or more Gigs of RAM can probably do that in DP, (or any other Mac DAW) out of the box, given enough I/O. (though probably not if it has to ALSO generate the tracks with VIs, AND process them with power-hungry plugins, heh-but they make accelerator cards for that; they won't fit in a Mini OR an iMac)

I took a loan and I can feel it, but it's worth it if you can!

I think the pro models are more stable as well. I've used mine for almost 3 years now, no problems.
The iMac gave me more trouble though, it hung up and so on.

I started with an imac and quickly outgrew it. Had to get a mac pro to really do the orchestra thing properly. Now my original imac was a dualcore, not even the core 2's. The new iMacs have very capable processors in them and you can get more RAM installed than you used to be able to. If you decide to go this route, fill it with RAM. 3rd party RAM is much cheaper than apple's and works fine.

Personally I still love my old iMac and still use it all the time even though its four years old. The form factor is just awesome and they are really well made machines. The only real drawback with them is you can't there is a RAM limit and the amount of ports on them are much more limited than what you get with the mac pro. And you are forced to used external drives that really have to be firewire to pull off the orcehstral stuff, at least with the East/West stuff. The mac pro allows for 4 internal drives to be installed and that's the way I like to roll.

You're biggest limitation will be the limited amount of firewire ports. Just means you're going to have to render tracks to audio more often than not. But I did that for 2 years before shelling out the cash for the big boy.

In summary, YES, it will work well for what you want. It's not optimal for orchestral, but that just means more time rendering and that's only because you don't have enough firewire ports to hook up the amount of drives you really need to stream properly and you can't install internal drives.

Get as much 3rd party RAM as you can!!!!

B

PS. Always check Apple's refurbished list. You can get great deals there and they treat them like new machine's. I've only bought refurbs.

mojobone wrote:I'm going to presume you meant that you're not recording 90+ instruments/streams to separate tracks.

See, that's what gets confusing. I'm NOT recording 90+ instruments, but I AM sequencing 90+ instruments on separate tracks. Big difference. It takes a lot of scrolling up and down to work on the separate instruments, but I just bought a 24" monitor that pivots.

Maybe 90+ is an exaggeration. I have the capability of doing that, though. On my last large symphonic piece I used lots of different samples on different sequenced tracks just for strings, maybe 30 total. Add 5 horn samples, 3 trumpets, 4 bones, 2 bass trombones, 2 tubas, 2 piccolos, 4 flutes, 4 oboes, 2 english horns, 4 bassoons, 2 contrabassoons, 2 bass clarinets, 2 contrabass clarinets, 2 timpani, 2 harps, orchestra bells, celeste, vibraphone, marimba, 2 snare drums, 2 bass drums, 2 piatti, 2 suspended cymbals, ride cymbal, tom toms, clave, tambourine, & temple blocks. These are all on separate tracks in DP. So let me add 'em up: Hmmm --- That's 89 tracks! So call me a liar!

And the above is easily done on a Mac G4 with 2 gig Ram. That's why I think that an iMac sequencing 89 instrument samples and recording maybe 8 audio tracks would be a breeze! I often record some live percussion, maybe a real violin or two, and that's about it.

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it!

Ern