Got my powerbook....

[MagnumSSS]

Well, after all my talk, I finally bought my powerbook. It's a 1.5 Ghz, combo drive with 1 gig of RAM. This thing smokes! The only issue so far is that when the laptop wakes up from sleep the mousepad or keyboard sometimes need a minute to wake up later. It's a slight worry, but has never been a serious problem so far.

So, Protools, Logic, or Digital Performer? Just kidding.....;-)

I'm going with Logic Pro 7, but it's gonna take a couple months until I get the $. I'm also pretty sure I'll use the Presonus Firebox for my little audio interface.

I'll give an update once I'm using Logic Pro 7 on my powerbook since this doesn't seem to be a very common setup for people here.

Mag

[T.Wesley]

Interesting - I'd say it's probably not your trackpad or keyboard taking longer to wake up, it's more likely the computer/OS 'waiting' until the hard drive is spun all the way up. All 3 of the G4 towers I use (all OSX.3) do the same thing - after waking, neither the keyboard nor mouse (trackball in my case) will work immediately every time.

In other words, I don't think it's a problem

--chiba

[MagnumSSS]

That's good news. I'm glad I'm not alone on that. Your reasoning makes sense, so I'll go with that for now.

[eugewong]

I run Logic Pro 7 on both my G4 tower (very old) and my newer G4 iBook. No problems on either, albeit a little laggy on the tower.

I doubt you'd run into any problems with the Logic.

[BSHARP]

A friend of mine was running a G4 with Logic 7 and BFD. With all the various plug-ins and effects running the G4 was bogging down. He just upgraded to the G5 dual processor.

[MagnumSSS]

Hmmmm.....two different experiences. How many tracks/effects do you guys use? Do you use the Freeze Track function?

Mag

[eugewong]

my tower is G4 400mhz, 512mg Ram. so that's pretty slow

ibook is Gz 1.33ghz, 1.2mb RAM, no problems so far... but i normally work off my tower.

the tower isn't bulletproof...so far the furthest i've pushed it is about 26-27 tracks..roughly an EQ an a comp/limiter on each track and a couple of reverbs. I can overload it, it'll tell me the cpu is too slow or something, so i take a little care not to let that happen.

I just bought a UAD-1 card to take some pressure off the cpu.

And yes...the first chance i get, i'll get a dual G5 too.... but i don't have that kind of coin lying around.

[eugewong]

i failed to mention that i DON'T use Space Designer.

that single plug can overload my processor.

also, that i use a MOTU 828mkII via firewire with both my macs...which might explain why i can still function, i remember reading somewhere that the 828MkII has a dsp chip in it that helps with some of the audio, so some processing is taken off the CPU. I'm not so sure about this, but i'm not complaining...

[MagnumSSS]

Why would one need to run BFD if Logic has a great drum machine built in? why not just get more sampled drums/kits to use with Logic?

[Orren]

Originally posted by MagnumSSS
Why would one need to run BFD if Logic has a great drum machine built in?

Different beasts.

BFD is just a drum sample playback module, but it allows for unprecidented tone shaping, mic placement emulation, and so on. It offers an amazing variety of ways to shape the sample.

UltraBeat in Logic is an amazingly deep and rich drum synthesizer. It allows you to take the output of an oscillator and shape it into an electronic drum sound. It gives you amazing options for modulations, filters, and envelopes to modify your sound. While it is capable of sample playback, it doesn't really offer you any real "sample shaping" other than to run it through it's filters and processing.

So if you want an acoustic drum module, BFD is currently king of the hill. If you want to program electronic drums yourself, UltraBeat is as deep as you can get.

Orren

[MagnumSSS]

Orren, that's good insight. I definitely fall into the acoustic drum world as I want to make real life drum patterns in the styles of jazz/rock/funk/reggae/country/etc. Seems like BFD is better for me then.

Isn't BFD a RAM based application? If I have 1 Gig of RAM, should that suffice?

[MagnumSSS]

I found this on FXPansion's website. It gives tips on optmizing your Mac (pre G5) for using BFD: http://www.fxpansion.com/support-mai...pfaq&n=bfd#115

[Denyle_Guitars]

Originally posted by MagnumSSS

Isn't BFD a RAM based application? If I have 1 Gig of RAM, should that suffice?

I was reading about BFD earlier today and notice some users upgraded to 4gb or more to keep the samples from being truncated.

[MagnumSSS]

That's just crazy in my opinion. There must be an easier way to do drum machine work. Ummmm.....Band in a Box maybe? With high quality samples?

[mike@switchback]

BFD will run on a gig. I have run it with only 768MB of RAM. You may have to compromise a bit though - use 16 bit mode, bounce early and often, etc.