PowerBooks, Firewire & Music - how?, advice on making connections, please Options

[tiloop]

I use a PowerBook G4/400 MHz and would like to create a home studio. I have a good mic with a jack and intend to buy keyboards with a Midi connection. How do I configure things so that I can use the FireWire port instead of the USB? Does anybody know? I know Yamaha makes an interface but I read that it's not compatible with the G4. Can anyone confirm that?

[igor]

Some people said that Imic works with Virtual Memory turn on, which is not compatible with Music software.
Any comment ?
Igor
PS : join LaptopMusic on egroup ;o)
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[Synthetic]

Any time you have virtual memory turned on, it uses disk space and speed to act as 'virtual ram' which may be ok for most apps but when dealing with music recording. You need all the disk speed you can get and if you have the computer accessing the disk for more than writing data while recording, you stand the chance of getting 'hicups' or lost audio during the recording. A standard apple OEM drive will do ok recording but the best drives are external (for cooling purposes and longetivity) and either firewire or scsi which allows guicker data transfer and it is ideal to get 7200rpm-10,000rpm drives for any audio / video work for the same reasoins that you shouldn't use virtual memory.

So, you may be able to run some music apps with virtual memory on (even it warns against it) but quality will suffer. Memory these days is at an all time low in cost so its good to get as much as you can afford... music apps and graphic apps love RAM and the more the better usually.

I have several sets of extensions in my extensions manager and I use these to optimize my mac for different tasks. One set has all options turned on... another set is just for music with only bare essentials turned on for music apps... the other set has only extensions that are needed for grpahics and games and that is what I use when playing games. I have found this helps protect against conflicts and keeps my cpu power free for what I want to do most but its a little inconvenient to reboot each time i want to change ;-)

Hope that helps.