mac advice please?

sixela · Post by **sixela** » Sat Jan 24, 2004 1:48 am

Okay, it got too much for me and i had to check out Metasynth so I managed to get hold of a power pc 7200/90 from work with an audiomedia 3 sound card in it and just saw on ebay someone selling exactly the same one upgraded to a G4 400 mhz, is that the max possible? if not how much can i up the CPU and ram to and what kind of ram does it need - it says on the motherboard it takes DRAM and VRAM, but I wouldn't know what any of this is or where I'd get it or how much, I'm so out of the Mac loop now - in fact the last time I properly used one it would have probably been this one when it was still used at work years ago. I can probably get hold of 0S9 or OSX from work too - is it worth installing one of them, it has B1 8.0?

Also, is it possible to get cards for things like firewire (I can plug my external hard-drive and FW410 into it then) and if so are they normal PCI cards - it has spare slots which looked like they could have been (at a glance - I was looking for somethign else at the time

Is it worth doing all this, will a G4 400mhz and whatever ram I can go up to be enough to run live 3.0 as well, possibly with other things rewired??

After all the Mac debate round here I'm really starting to get into the idea of going back to mac, or at least using it for some things - at the moment i have it plugged into the inputs of my firewire 410 on the PC laptop going into live - treating it as a hardware synth

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

cheers

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Sat Jan 24, 2004 2:10 am

the system you describe would not perform very well.. especially with live and rewire going on. the system bus on a 7200 is VERY slow, a 400mhz g4 isn't too snappy for running X, and X is not supported on upgraded cpus like that so installing would require some work arounds. Unless you can get one for a song i can't say i'd reccomend a mac like that. go for a used imac w/firewire, or an older g3 or g4 tower. these offer much more upgradability, and when the day is over make sure you've spent MUCH less than $799 or you could have had a 1ghz g4 with the newest os in the form of an emac.

sixela · Post by **sixela** » Sat Jan 24, 2004 2:15 am

Anonymous wrote:the system you describe would not perform very well.. especially with live and rewire going on. the system bus on a 7200 is VERY slow, a 400mhz g4 isn't too snappy for running X, and X is not supported on upgraded cpus like that so installing would require some work arounds. Unless you can get one for a song i can't say i'd reccomend a mac like that. go for a used imac w/firewire, or an older g3 or g4 tower. these offer much more upgradability, and when the day is over make sure you've spent MUCH less than $799 or you could have had a 1ghz g4 with the newest os in the form of an emac.

thanks for the reply,

I was given this one, so it's what i've got, so I'm hoping i can get the parts to upgrade it very cheaply - wouldn't it be worth it at all? I may only use it for metasynth....

sixela · Post by **sixela** » Sat Jan 24, 2004 2:45 am

also, would it be better to load os9? And would my USB2 PCI card on my PC work on it?

cheers

Alex Reynolds · Post by **Alex Reynolds** » Sat Jan 24, 2004 3:22 am

Without cunning and trickery, you'll be stuck running OS 9 on a pre-G3 upgraded to a G4. The OS X installer won't work (directly) on such a system. That said you won't have to deal with the OS X overhead -- but you lose the OS X goodies like stability, UNIX, being able to run recent apps, etc.

-Alex

sixela · Post by **sixela** » Sat Jan 24, 2004 4:28 am

Alex Reynolds wrote:Without cunning and trickery, you'll be stuck running OS 9 on a pre-G3 upgraded to a G4. The OS X installer won't work (directly) on such a system. That said you won't have to deal with the OS X overhead -- but you lose the OS X goodies like stability, UNIX, being able to run recent apps, etc.

-Alex

thanks Alex

do you know anything about metasynth? - this is mainly what i think i will use it for, my PC set-up's pretty solid by now, no need to disrupt the flow, only thing i want the mac for is metasynth and any other apps that are mac only, it's only that i came upon this one that i'm bothering with it I would have got an imac or something, but 'free' is alot cheaper than I'd get an Imac for, especially as it's about $300 for metasynth - but then it's hardly worth buying that if it wont run properly on whatever i can turn this machine into.

But just trying this machine that's so old and slow, I'm remembering what it was i used to like about mac - I can definitely see how it fits in with creative stuff - there definitely is something in the feel of it that's a bit more inspiring. Getting given an old mac is alot different to getting given an old PC.

But at the moment it's luxury unless i can upgrade this for well under 100 quid. Because I could get an Imac for not much more than that and they look loads better and i'd probably even gig one. But there's one on Ebay at the moment that's been upgraded to G4 400 and given 300mb ram, at about 100 quid, which sounds a bit better than the specs on the imacs at around that price

Alex Reynolds · Post by **Alex Reynolds** » Sat Jan 24, 2004 4:39 am

You might as well stick with OS 9 since, as far as I know, Metasynth is OS 9-only anyway, if that's all you're running. I wouldn't waste money on upgrading it just to run OS X, but that's me.

All that I know about Metasynth is that Richard James hid a picture of his face in one of his songs, and Metasynth's sonograph was used to sneak it out.

-Alex

sixela · Post by **sixela** » Sat Jan 24, 2004 5:13 am

Alex Reynolds wrote: All that I know about Metasynth is that Richard James hid a picture of his face in one of his songs, and Metasynth's sonograph was used to sneak it out.

-Alex

excellent. Nothing would terrify me more than to be in that darkened studio space within the psychedelic confines of meta synth, only to see that grinning maniac staring at me. I think I'd just give up and admit myself.

It's an Idea I love though. I started on a track not that long ago that was made up of bitmaps - by changing the extension to raw, opening them in an audio editor and saving them as wavs. I also tried using text files, but you need to copy and paste alot of text or find something really long.

If you're a mac man and haven't checked out metasynth then you should. I've been gaggin for a copy since i heard about it but haven't had access to a mac for long enough to try it, but even on this one with the demo i can see it is amazing. I kind of like the fact that it's on a different machine that i record into live rather than pissing about with rewire and the like and watching the cpu all the time - good old fashioned recording the analog way. Not that it really makes the blindest bit of difference, but despite the hassle of having this thumping great clunky machine here to play one synth, there is something quite cool about it, like having an old sampler or something. But at the end of it, it's not really workable as is, metasynth needs a much more powerful machine to do it justice, but i would have thought upping it to something like G4 400 with 300 meg ram would make it a bit more comfortable considering it's more a sound source than anything.

sixela · Post by **sixela** » Sat Jan 24, 2004 7:12 pm

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Sun Jan 25, 2004 2:00 pm

Love it! " the old fashioned way"!!

Hmmmm. as the previous owner of:

a 7100/80 Mac AV ('95)
a ????/200 ('97)
a G4 400 ('00)
and a Tibook 500 ('02-)

reminds me of the old gag (and comeback line)...

"You can't polish a turd"

- You CAN if you freeze it

cheers
p

tjwett not logged in · Post by **tjwett not logged in** » Sun Jan 25, 2004 5:22 pm

yeah MetaSynth is wonderful. i'm bummed i don't have an OS 9 machine around to run it. it's such a blast. and it's funny to think back to creating music with Photoshop. and it is still OS 9 only. there is an OS X version on the way but i'm honestly not excited for it, i'm sure it will be a while before it's stable enough to use.