Leaving Amiga - Need PC emulation / music recording advice.

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NoFastMem wrote:

mdivancic wrote:
I'm sorry, but if you are really making the move to a new OS I'd spend the time and money to run a native program. There must be programs that have passed Bars & Pipes in features significantly in the last, what, ten years?

Agreed... Give Renoise a look. Also, last I checked, MED SoundStudio was still available for Windows.

I just wouldn't trust the timing from an emulated solution. It's time to move on.  :-(

I use old Amiga programs in Emulation for making music all the time... But only contribution to this thread would be to suggest a Mac with Logic Pro... That is a complete music workstation... My last album was almost completely built using Logic Pro, I did a bit of work in UAE with OctaMED, a few of my hardware synths got used and our mix engineer like to mix the stems in Pro Tools...

But proportionally, 92.4% of the work was done in Logic Pro, on my trusty MacBook Pro...

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Wolfeman wrote:
If you're a musician, I would go with the Mac and OSX. I've been an electronic musician since the 80s and the Macintosh has been at the center of the studio to this very day. You can find a G4 tower for the same you would pay for a 1Ghz PC and it will blow the PC away.

No way!!!! The PPC Macs simply don't have the horsepower for serious Music making. Logic Pro was horrible on my G4...  I always had to go back to a PC with Protools before the Intel Macs came along. I skipped the G5s because thy were too expensive compared with comparable PC systems (that even came in Notebook form).

Get a Cheap brand new iMac, and Logic Express... and be done with it.

I would not try to emulate any other system for audio, you should check out the native programs, as I'm positive you'll find something that can do what you need, possibly even Garage Band which often comes bundled with OSX on Mac G4 systems sold used.

Garageband is pretty good, but you are not going to do any Professional work with it.

For an audio interface you can use the built in stereo audio which is very high quality or you can go pro with a PCI expansion or a Firewire device.

The internal Audio of all Mac machines is actually surprising good, and has saved my neck a few time when my Audio interfaces have given out!

PC Notebook manufacturers have always used substandard Audio components... Grrrr...

My advice is to stay away from any audio or hd peripherals that only support USB as Firewire on the Mac is much faster and stable and USB on the Mac, even 2.0 is like 50% slower on a Mac than it is on a PC.

All my Audio interfaces are Firewire... I'm planning to get a MOTO Ultralite 3 soon... Firewire's biggest strength is that it also provides power to the unit.

But if you are on a budget USB, is suitable, and does the job.

I'd also stay away from digidesign hardware and software as they are very slow to upgrade software support for their hardware and very often you find yourself stuck with an older OS just to be able to use the hardware. Unless you have thousands of dollars for a full blown pro-tools rig, just stay away from their entry level stuff, they don't support it adequately in my opinion.

M-Audio makes some very inexpensive but nicely made peripherals. I have a USB MIDI controller by M-Audio and a Tascam 8ch firewire for audio in and out and I paid less than $300 total for both on my G5. I have an older G4 with a MOTU 2408 that I got very cheaply and that works very nicely.

good luck with it, whatever you decide.

I'm no fan of DigiDesign stuff either... I do like Edirol's FA series.

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amigaksi wrote:
by ferrellsl on 2008/8/8 19:02:44

>What about using WinUAE? Emulated Amiga and you still get to use all of your familiar Amiga software.

>Any modern PC has the horsepower to emulate the Amiga and its custom chips.

That would be illogical.  If someone is going to start all over with a new system that assuming can do better then the Amiga in all respects, then it would be better to use the PC program rather than an emulated program since emulator is going to involve remapping stuff to affect performance whereas native PC program would not involve that.  

Don't be weird, there are somethings that are just easier and more natural to do in an old program that only exists on the Amiga... OctaMED is one such program that in E-UAE was even used on my last Album!!!

Of course, you can't perfectly emulate the Amiga and custom chips so other issues will be factors as well.

Of course you can't... that must explain why I wasn't able to use OctaMED in UAE on my last Album... no wait, I DID use it... oh I'm getting all confused :roll:

Didn't people use Atari ST music stuff even while Amigas were around?  

Only because it had a built in MIDI interface... Since I was into sampling the Amiga pissed all over the AtariST :-) And then I got a cheap MIDI interface for my Amiga...  :-)

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ferrellsl wrote:

It was much easier and cheaper to get an XP box and WinUAE.

Or a nice intel Mac (though not quite as cheap, and E-UAE isn't as easy to se up as WInUAE)... But I do prefer the Audio architecture of MacOSX :-)

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spihunter wrote:
@bloodline,

Garageband is pretty good, but you are not going to do any Professional work with it.

That might have been true in the past but now that Garageband is 24bit and can do 4 different real time effects per track at once I see no need to upgrade to Logic.

Click on the link in my Sig and listen to "Dancing Milk Cartons"

It was done with Garageband, AU plugins, a single MIDI Keyboard, and a microphone.

As far as the original poster goes though Gargageband cant do the type of MIDI setup he has going.

It all depends on what your writing and how you do it I guess?

There is nothing wrong with the quality of GarageBand, it is after all based on the Logic Audio engine!!! But it simply doesn't give you the control required in a Professional Studio.

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NoFastMem wrote:

Wolfeman wrote:
@bloodline: Well, dude, you're obviously no Mac fan, and that's fine, there are PC people and Mac people but if you look at benchmark tests between G4s and 1Ghz era PC processors, the mac wins every time.

You did read the posts where he repeatedly recommended a Mac, right? ;-)

No, I hate Mac!!! I'm gonna throw all of my expensive Macs away... I shall burn my Logic 8 package... Curse you iPhone... the bin for you!!  iPod, I deny thee!!! I must expunge Apple from my house...

I think the point is more that the Core 2 Macs now pee all over the PPC line. Now if I came across a deal on a G5 tower I might bite but otherwise... No.

I did a lot of recording with GarageBand on my old PowerBook but it wouldn't have dealt with Logic 8 the way I use that (on a 2.4GHz Core 2 iMac). If you're using live effects you can always use more processing power.

Quite right... if you are just using Logic as a multitrack recorder, then a nice fast Hard Drive is far more important than a fast CPU... but as an electronic artist, it's rare for me to have a channel with less than 8 effects inserts... and given the average number of channels per song on my last Album was 30, you can see why I need the power of a modern dual core intel chip not some old G4...  and this does not include all the bus routing I like to use...

I also have the need to have my set up totally portable, which means laptop... and the Powerful PPC chips are just too hot and electricity hungry for a laptop.

@Wilse: The usb on a mac for some reason is bloody slow. ever try to hook up a usb hard drive or disc burner? omg it's awful. let alone a usb flash drive, it always takes twice as long to copy files and even on my dual processor G5.

For MIDI it's fine and even some audio interfaces but for my money and time the firewire is faster and more reliable.

I've never found it that bad, but I wonder if your experience is that file transfers aren't buffered the way they are in Windows (they changed that for Vista, everyone complained and it was switched back for SP1). That's no measure of the Mac's USB performance for audio hardware, etc., much as I prefer Firewire gear too. (I'm also on the lookout for a proper interface... Recording through on-board off an analog Yamaha mixer at the moment.)

While USB2 is totally horrible for Hard drives... audio interfaces work fine, but the USB does not provide enough power to run the interface, so Firewire is far better. I've noticed that Firewire Audio interfaces have slightly lower latency, but I don't think this is due the bus, but more because Firewire devices are more expensive and thus better quality units (as manufactures can afford to use better components).


Punkie: This will be my next audio interface...

http://www.motu.com/products/motuaudio/ultralite-mk3

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the_leander wrote:

amigaksi wrote:
What exactly are the differences between an original (OCS) Amiga 1000 sound functionality and Amiga 4000 sound functionality?  They both use the same timing and equal spec DACs (OCS compatible).  It's a different story when you know the hardware specs are different.

For that you would have to ask someone who knows the hardware to that level, I suggest Karlos or Bloodline (fnar!), I do remember them discussing how there was a huge amount of incosistancy within different variants of the same model when they were doing timings testing.

Paula was essentially unchanged across the Amiga range... I don't think it even had a process change so the output should be identical!

The DAC inside Paula was not linear though, and that gives its output a natural colour not found in modern "perfect" DACs.