My G4/protools/m-audio Situation... Options

[parsifal]

Hi all...new to the forum & I'm kind of new to the whole world of computer recording too, coming from more of a tape & then digital 16 track DAW background...but pretty soon I'm going to have a s/h g4 Powermac ( 450 cpu, 512 ram) to play with.
I'm going to run ProTools Free on it ( can't afford full blown PT just yet) & I have a little audioBuddy pre. I'm also thinking about getting a better soundcard - something like the Audiophile 2496.

So...will this card be compatible with my set-up?

Oh...and my Mac has OS X & Panther installed, but ProTools Free only works on OS9 so I'm pretty sure I'll have to install that & remove OSX...unless it'll run in Classic mode.

Any tips, advice, etc will be gratefully received!!

Thanks..

[rickenbacker]

Coldharbour: Topic: Digidesign MBox 2 USB - Computer Hardware (in Forums, Comments). OK, it's only one thread, but it's a long one. General vibe: negative. With the obvious exception of celticdale.

I'm always curious to know why people consider that they need to learn Pro Tools because it's "the standard in most studios these days". To use a publishing analogy, QuarkXPress had been "the standard" for a long time, but having taken a rather cavalier approach to their user base in recent years (not unlike a certain DAW manufacturer), it now finds itself usurped by InDesign in many companies. Both are good products and both work in largely the same way, so it's not that confusing to switch from one to the other.

Now Quark is desparately trying to claw back all the old users who it rather took advantage of for too long. Those users looked around, found that alternatives to XPress existed that were better, cheaper and more flexible, so off they went - and they're not looking back wistfully at Quark, either. If I was starting out again in magazine editing, I'd learn InDesign in preference to Quark.

I'm just saying don't get tunnel vision about Pro Tools. So big studios use it. If you were actually recording in such a studio, someone else far more experienced than you would be engineering the board, anyway. If you wanted to work in such a studio, you probably wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the desk for a long, long time and you'd learn everything by looking over the hosue engineer's shoulder, so the fact that you'd picked up a few tricks using Pro Tools Free at home wouldn't exactly do you a lot of good either.

Forget about software - learn to engineer and record well and it doesn't matter what program you're using. If you can mic up drums, amps, guitars, pianos etc and produce a decent mix, that's the kind of skills people want. And if you were just talking about starting stuff at home and then transferring to a big studio to finish the project, again it doesn't matter what software you started with because AIFF files are the same the world over. You can import them to anything.

There's nothing wrong with Pro Tools, of course, but Digidesign have a horrible closed upgrade path that increasingly limits your choices the further you go with them. PT Free only exists to draw you into their world! Like vampires, only with music.

I'd second mortalengines comment about OS 9, too - hardly anything new is issued for it these days. Stick with OS X, hone your recording chops using GarageBand, save up for an Mbox 2 (if you must!) and you'll be in a much better position in the long run. Whatever you do, don't remove OS X - you might as well leave it on there.

[Will2009]

you are right on target rickenbacker , regarding pro tools. I've been blessed to have submitted music to some industry people, whom were surprised that the work I had done was done with Logic. of, course, it was them that assumed that it was, with pro tools you should also count the cost, for all of the plug-ins that you might want to incorporate, and a lot of them are great and lend to giving you a great sound, however,the cost could be go thru the roof. don't believe the hype, work with what you can afford, and let's you express your musical ideas in a fashion that the listener can appreciate, they, the listener don't know the difference, but they do know what sounds good to them, and, this can be achieved without pro-tools, trust me, come up with good compositions, and not to many people will care what you used to do it. :-)