Mac specifically for Logic Music production

[funkyspider]

A mate at work is talking about buying a Mac specifically to run Logic Pro, but we know very little about the hardware so thought I'd ask here.

He hasn't mentioned a budget at the moment, but as it's for a fairly well spec'd 'home' studio rather than a commercial enterprise so I should imagine its in the 'keep it reasonable' range.

So can I ask what is a recommended new and secondhand buy please to give him something to look at. I'm guessing the more memory you can pack into it the better for handling large audio samples.

Thanks in advance
Martin.

[jms_uk]

I use a PC for my music production, but I've got a macbook for home a/v duties...

Seeing as the intel platform is becoming a "standard" for both OSes, its a fairly safe bet that like-for-like comparisons are easier to accomplish now..

I've got a 2.6GHz Core2-based 2GB RAM Windows XP PC that I use for music, running Cubase SX.. a whole load of Virtual instruments including some rather "system intensive" ones like Spectrasonics Atmosphere, Trilogy and Stylus RMX.. It doesn't even break a sweat when running multiple tracks (say on average 15-20+) of that, audio with a bunch of plugins, eq etc. (less than 20% CPU utilisation at a guess). On a machine of that spec, you can also expect things like rending an audio project of similar complexity, to a Stereo 44.1KHz WAv file to take about 40secs

With that in mind, hopefully you'll have enough info to scale up/down your requirements as necessary.. I *used* to do my production on an Athlon XP 2100+ which was getting on a bit hence the upgrade..

The main thing whatever you guys choose to go with, is that you spec up something with at least 1GB Ram (minimum), 5400RPM or better HDD and an audio solution with good solid low-latency drivers.

Installed system RAM is important, but so is the HDD you choose to install (when using instruments that have a lot of sample data on disc.. eg. Atmosphere, The Grand, Gary Garritan strings etc). Also make sure that you don't have an installation of your OS with lots of rubbish installed that may eat CPU cycles in the background without you realising it (bear in mind I'm talking from a Windows perspective here but the same is kinda true with OS X too)

[Tenex]

Originally Posted by funkyspider

A mate at work is talking about buying a Mac specifically to run Logic Pro, but we know very little about the hardware so thought I'd ask here.

On that wonderfully snowy Sunday last we were in the woods building a snowman when the next nearest family construction crew hit a problem and we went over to help. To cut a long story short we fathers found we were both enthusiastic Mac users and I was told that a MacBook Pro was the ideal music machine, but...

Logic Pro is a predecessor of the current Logic Studio/Express. It was revised a few months back from memory. Anyway here's the Logic spec from Apple.

Minimum Requirements to Install All Applications

• • Mac computer with a 1.25GHz or faster PowerPC G4 processor (PowerPC G5, Intel Core Duo, or Intel Xeon processor highly recommended)
• • 1GB of RAM (2GB or more highly recommended)
• • Display with 1024-by-768 resolution (1280-by-800 or higher recommended)
• • Mac OS X v10.4.9 or later
• • QuickTime 7.2 or later
• • DVD drive for installation
• • PCI Express, ExpressCard/34, USB, or FireWire based audio interface recommended

Available Disk Space

• • 7GB to install all applications and required content
• • Additional 39GB to install all optional content (large content packages can be installed on separate disk):
• – 10GB for Jam Pack collections
• – 16GB for sound effects
• – 6GB for surround music beds
• – 7GB for other optional content

From this you can see the that any current Mac product (Air excepted for ports etc) is up to spec to run this though you'll need a decent amount of HDD space and you might want portability so perhaps a MacBook or MacBook Pro would be sufficient? You could use something like an external WD My Book** for music storage as its cheaper than upgrading the internal drive and also you're bound to need external storage soon.

** NB the comments about storing music

Whether you decide to go for a desktop or notebook one way of reducing the cost is to buy from the Apple refurb store - don't be put off by the title its all 12 month warranty etc and as good as new except up to ~15% cheaper. You need to look in there through the day as kit is added and sold quite quickly.
HTH

[jms_uk]

Spot on Tenex... although from experience, those quoted specs don't factor in overheads for running intensive virtual instruments within Logic, or ones which do a lot of HDD streaming of samples.