Intel iMac Question

[fiddler69]

I have been "looking" at PT forever (along with many other options) and am still considering but I could use some input. I'm interested in making the move to Mac for this - it will be a dedicated machine and I'm just a hobbyist - not planning on making the next platinum album in my home studio.
My brother in law has a mac and I have played around with it and really like it. And since it "just seems to work" with PT - it would be a good stepping off point.

I will be recording 90% audio 10% midi based instruments etc. Portability isn't a huge issue for me. It would be great to be able to pick it up and carry it with me like a MacBook but it's not
mandatory.

From everything I have read and researched, the new Intel iMac's should more than accomodate anything I would ever do from a "processing" standpoint. I may have an interest in Music Production Toolkit and 48 tracks at some point - but not right away - and from what I have heard and picked up from talking to Digi support they still say I should sail along just fine.

Since I am a hobbyist I don't really want to invest in a MacPro. From what I've seen it would cost me close to twice that of a reasonable iMac and peripheral drives. The iMac really interests me, but the single internal drive and hooking up other external drives is where I get lost in how it would work, and how "productive" this setup would be. Per Digi recommendations if I ever get to 48 tracks I should have two audio drives. I will also want one or more drives for BFD and other sound files etc. So now I'm up to 3-4 external drives. Having never worked with a Mac or external drives of any sort, I know I can daisy chain these drives together, but can I do it without seeing any serious degradation of performance? I have read that if you need multi-drives you should just go to MacPro - but that just seems like a lot of overkill for a non-professional.

This may seem like a very easy question to those of you that have done this for awhile, but I'm having a hard time getting my arms around the best way to skin this cat. I know I should figure out what I want to do - and then buy hardware to fit that.....but having never done it before I don't know if the iMac hardware route fits what I'm trying to accomplish.

Thanks in advance.

[WilliamDC]

I recently moved from a PC setup to a Mac setup with an iMac. I bought a LaCie D2 250gb external hard drive for my samples and recording audio. My iMac is a 2ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 1gb of RAM. So far, it works like a dream and performs much better than my 2ghz Athlon 64 did. I'm constantly running it with the buffer at 128 and I haven't seen a hiccup yet whether I'm recording or mixing. I can safely say that I'm done with Windows.

[fiddler69]

William:

Thanks for the input. Just wondering - did you do any research in regard to putting your audio and samples on the same drive? Or, did you just do it and it worked? I just haven't seen that scenario recommended or talked about anywhere. It would obviously help solve multi drive issues.

Anyone else out there running and iMac in a multi-drive configuration - specifically with 3+ drives?

[WilliamDC]

William:

Thanks for the input. Just wondering - did you do any research in regard to putting your audio and samples on the same drive? Or, did you just do it and it worked? I just haven't seen that scenario recommended or talked about anywhere. It would obviously help solve multi drive issues.

Anyone else out there running and iMac in a multi-drive configuration - specifically with 3+ drives?

I just haven't had any problems doing so over the years. Most of the time when I'm working with soft synths, though, I'm not working with recording audio. I'm usually doing one or the other. If I am doing both at the same time, It's usually 90% of either audio or synths. Most of the synths I use, though, come from Reason.