Guitar Rig...and Newbie Introduction, Powerbook G4 setup for college recording Options

[iShawn]

Hi there. I know this is mainly based in the UK, or so it seems, but I am an American on here. God...the elections drive many of the forumers away!

Well...I have just recently gotten into macintosh, and convinced my father to get me a 15" 1.5GHz Powerbook with 512MB of Ram (or maybe higher if I can talk him into it) for college...for I need a laptop to take around campus anyways. I chose Mac because I am getting tired of all the shit on PCs these days, and the way thigns are more accessible in Panther really drives me towards it (My school's graphic design has Power Macs for everyone in the classroom) for it's use and functionality (God I love the way you can specify how much RAM you want used for each app!)

So...I wanted to let you know that the best thing for me is the new Firepod from Presonus. It will allow me to do some of the combo and larger-band recording (I play mainly jazz) but it will allow a nice way that I can do my solo jazz guitar stuff. More on that later though. Firepod comes with Cubase LE and I have searched on here about the problems and the very rave reviews on Cubase, and for what I want to do (with a max of 16 tracks pretty much) I'm sure Cubase will perform stellar.

Watching the 2004 Keynote WWDC I saw the plugin for Guitar Rig in there. That looks really cool, I am looking up stuff on it now and I really think it'd be cool to mess around with. I wanted to know what you all had opinions or thoughts about or if any of you have it and could proclaim it's faith so-to-speak. I think this would be really cool for the solo guitar stuff that I could mess around with none-the-least. My question is...I know it is a program, but can it perform like a plug-in as well (for Cubase for example)?

And also...a side-note.
What files can you export Cubase to for mass media (like wav mp3, etc.)