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Hello... let me start by saying that I am very new to home recording, PT, and MAC. Having said that, I have alot of questions, mostly general at this point, but trust me... lots more to follow.

So here is what I did... I have been reading this forum and all the advice from some of the pro's on here (Thank you) and have used that info to put together what I think is a nice home studio.

My set-up
Mac Pro quad core 2.66 Ghz with 8 gig of Ram - OS X Snow Leopard ( my windows PC with AMD processor would not work so I bought the Mac)
M Box 2 Pro with PT LE 8.0 (downloaded 8.0.3) factory bundle
dual 20" flat panel monitors
M Audio reference monitors

The QUESTIONS;

1. PT says that you should record and save your sessions on a separate external HD. Not the drive that your OS is on. they also have specific criteria that the drive should have...
- Can I just use a second internal HD in the Mac Pro?
- Any thoughts on the MERCURY Elite-Al Pro (Firewire 800/400, USB 2.0, eSATA) external HD from Other World Computing?

2. PT recommends in the basic user guide that you change some settings so that your computer will run PT better...
- Should I turn off the auto update feature? If so... how do you get the updates from MAC, and are there any updates I should avoid that will mess with PT?

3. This may sound stupid, but how do I get to the programs that I would use to record guitar or bass... (like Amplitube). Again, I am new to MAC and what I would like to do is plug my guitar in and hear some of the guitar plugins... are they in there????


At this point, I have PT installed, I have opened it and listened to the Demo and clicked a few buttons... did record a Mic check and it seems to be working ok... I am not getting any error messages at this point.

thanks for the help... many more questions to follow.