Making Music With A New Ibook, Looking for setup help Options

[musicteacher]

I am a public school music teacher who is thinking about getting a new iBook to use as a portable music making tool. Here's what I would like to do with it:

1. Sequence backing tracks in various musical styles for my students to play along with in class. I'd want to burn these backing tracks onto cd and bring them into the classroom so my kids can jam to a calypso-style "This Land Is Your Land" or whatever. What would be good software to do this with an iBook?

2. Record my own music and my students music either live or track by track - what is the best way to get sound into an iBook?

3. Begin to explore the world of software synths. Which ones are easy to use and can interact well with the software/hardware used for the above two items?

I hope that's clear enough. I'd appreciate any suggestions. If there's anyone answering who lives in the NYC area and can help me in person with this I'd be really grateful. Thank you for supporting public education.

[rickenbacker]

charlieb: I mean that whatever Mac you own, you're going to need to add either a better quality soundcard (if you have a tower) or a FireWire or USB interface if you have a laptop. If you're at all serious about the fidelity of your recordings, the internal soundcard of the Mac (although pretty good) won't be good enough. This is true for most musicians here, I'd say.

Presto's Mbox is a USB interface: the MOTU 828 or 868 that a lot of people here seem to like is a FireWire interface. There are plenty of interfaces around to choose from - Edirol, M-Audio, Emagic etc all make various flavours. Some have Midi, some have digital I/O, some have FX onboard. It all comes down to cost.

FireWire is faster than USB, obviously, which is why some people say USB isn't sturdy enough to cope with multitrack audio. But like Presto says, it depends how much you're doing. If you're a professional engineer or musician and you want to send 24 tracks out from your Mac to an external digital mixer, you're probably better off with a FireWire device. If you're only sending a stereo signal back and forth, or maybe a few more tracks, USB is fine. I use a 600MHz iBook with an Edirol USB interface and it's been good for me.

But if I had a sackload of money, I'd buy a new PowerBook, a FireWire interface like the MOTU 868 and a FireWire hard disk. Probably cost close to £4,000 all in. Dare to dream!