Please Help. Logic Or Protools? Options

[lantzn]

Hello All,
My son and some friends have started a small garage band. They recently bought some really nice speakers and a mixing board with something like 8-10 channels/tracks. This things has just about every imaginable connections I ever seen on it. I'm a computer graphics person by profession and really get into cool software, I'm now studying Electric Image Universe 3D app. They came to me and asked if I could setup a MP3 jukebox for them after seeing my tower running iTunes. I sold them my iMac 400 DVSE, we dropped in a 160GB drive and a Gig of memory and have currently loaded all our CD collections onto it. They now plug the iMac into the mixing board and the songs really rock over the new speakers! I thought I was at a concert.

Now they want me to be their "sound man" and find some software that we can use to send some tracks into my G4 tower from the mixing board and eventually burn to CD. Last night I loaded the free Pro Tools LE and OMS package. We played around with some simple voice tracks since we didn't have it near the band's equipment. We used the Mac's little microphone to get the sound in. They got pretty excited about it. Of course I had to bootup into OS9 to run ProTools. I'm currently running 10.2.1, have a Radeon 8500AGP, Radeon 7000PCI, 60 and 80GB drives and 2GB of ram in this G4 400 sawtooth tower.

My question, what software for OS X should I be looking at when a OS X version is released? The LE, light, beginners edition is probably all we would ever need. Pro Tools LE looked like it had plenty of features along with the 8 track limit. What about a LE version of Logic? Does one exist. I know we're just now seeing OS X music software coming our way. I can mess around with Pro Tools LE in OS 9 until something is available but I'm not sure if I want to learn it to much if something else would be better. I'm a pretty fast learner and can jump around different software apps without problems.

Thanks

[lantzn]

Here's what I have for hardware.

G4 400MHz "sawtooth" tower
2GB ram
Mac OS X 9.2.2 on a 60GB 5400 rpm ATA Maxtor internal drive
Mac OS X 10.2.1 on a 80GB 7200 rpm ATA Maxtor internal drive
Radeon 8500 AGP running 17" NEC
Radeon 7000 PCI running 17" NEC
QPS Que cdrom burner
Roxio Toast/iTunes
Quicktime 6 Pro edition

Here's what they have.

Mackie Compact Mixer 1202 VLZ Pro
http://www.mackie.com/record/1202vlzpro/index.html

Mackie SA1232 Speakers - two
http://www.mackie.com/sr/sa1232/index.html
Good gawd! After reading these specs, no wonder the little iMac fellow sounded like a concert.

No I don't play in the band, but I've always been a music fan. My singing sounds like the singer from Crash Test Dummies (low, deep and throaty), and we all know how many bands have a singer who sounds like him. My sons says I grew up in the "butt-rocker" music days. Hey I graduated in 1977, what can I say? Over the years I've like just about all types of music except country and rap.

I currently have over 500 music cds, and had a ton of LPs which were all recorded onto a Teac reel-to-reel years ago. I like preserving my investments (LPs) which is why keeping my music in MP3 format on my computer with iTunes is so cool. My G4 tower has over 5600 songs in iTunes and says if I play them all, it'd take over 18 days! Now all my friends keep feeding "the machine" with all their cds when they come over. I think they're seeing if they can bring her down or something, haha.