Cubase Sx Or Ableton Live? Options

[humphz]

Hi

I have managed to get my hands on both Cubase SX & Ableton Live 4 ( a good friend was upgrading and he did me a good deal).

Decisions, decisions, decisions...

Which one would suit me best?

I have an emu audity 2000 which i would love to get cranked and would like to use audio samples too but at the moment dont have any way of heraring the two together. (but i do have an analogue mixer but unsure how to set it all up)

This is my first attempt at trying to make my music and although im a wiz when it comes to macs the music side of things kinda baffles me sometimes.

any ideas welcome?

cheers

Humphz

[gdoubleyou]

I own both, the real story is about the optimization of both apps. SX has the highest hardware requirement of all the Mac DAWS. And because it shares a code base with the windows version, there is very little Mac specific optimization in the Mac version. So it does not perform well on anything less than a G5 class machine.

From my experience I can use 40%-60% more instances of effects and virtual instruments using Logic or Digital Performer when compared to SX. Good concept, just works 100% better on a PC. And that's where my copy will reside until something changes on the Mac side it's not worth my time.

Live is a different animal, when compared to othe DAWs. but again it suffers from poor Mac optimization. It dosen't support the Altivec instructions, and doesn't support dual processors. So even modest Windows machines smoke dual G5's when using Live. You can get work done but dense arrangements are out. Also the live sound engine is not the greatest, so most people ReWire their tracks to their favorite DAW or export the individual tracks into their DAW of choice.

So the answer is Logic closely followed by DP4, are the most effecient apps.