Would you use one of the new iMacs for music?

[Philip OKeefe]

I know of at least one fourmite who is considering a new iMac. They look pretty tempting at those prices - $1,299 for the 17" G5?

[Alon]

Originally posted by Dan South:

So, yes, there CAN be limitations to how hard you can push those FW busses.

What you say about firewire stuff getting "choked" is true if pushed too hard, however having two firewire ports is not the same as having two firewire busses.

 

alon

[Philip OKeefe]

That's true - I actually have two seperate firewire interfaces on my main DAW machine - one on the motherboard and a second one via a PCI card. One is used for audio interfaces and the other one for external firewire drives.

 

If your needs are reasonable, I doubt you'd have a problem with the new iMacs for audio... if you plan on having a ton of I/O and several external drives, you should probably look elsewhere. It really just depends on how you want to use it and the demands you are going to place on it.

[Dan South]

Originally posted by Alon:

Originally posted by Dan South:

So, yes, there CAN be limitations to how hard you can push those FW busses.

What you say about firewire stuff getting "choked" is true if pushed too hard, however having two firewire ports is not the same as having two firewire busses.

 

alon

Well, yeah. I think that the ports are all on one bus internally. That's exactly the problem. The sample streaming conflicted with the audio output. Tracking on a third FW port would make it even more complicated.

 

That said, I've never experienced difficulties with tracking, only with sample streaming. It's probably something in NI's streaming mechanism (Kontakt, Kompakt, East West Symphonic Orchestra, etc.).