Well, my SSD just died in my PC and due to the fact that it was behind Bitlocker I just kissed the whole thing good bye.
I love cubase and don’t intend to change that but I’m sitting here and thinking if maybe I should get an iMac just for music.
I work a lot on my pc with graphics and etc so my idea is to get a dedicated music workstation.
Can a mac user tell me how is overbridge working? Focusrite drivers and etc?
I have Blofeld, minitaur, mopho, A4 and OT (arriving later today).
All those synths are used as VST in cubase.
I’m just trying to figure out if my idea makes sense or I should stay with PC.
I switched from Mac to PC last year and in my opinion the only thing that will govern your speed are your computer specs. My PC is slightly faster, but the specs are slightly better also so to be expected.
I needed a new Mac last year and found the new prices had jumped too much to justify staying with Mac.
My Windows computer runs just the same, never had an issue, but never an issue with my Mac either.
There is nothing in it between the two for me except cost
Curiously enough, I had massive problems on my Windows machine with my old Blofeld’s MIDI sync. I just couldn’t get the Blofeld’s arpeggiator to ever run in sync with the MIDI clock. Connected it to my Mac, perfect sync, no worries.
That’s IMO the issue with PC hardware: It’s so heterogenous that sometimes you just end up with a weird combination of components and drivers which do not play nice with each other. If you had everything running on your PC, then stick with it - switching to macOS will come with some new challenges and frustrations, which you might not want to put up with if all you want to do is make music…
Either is good, personally I think with the direction mac has been going now might not be the best time to switch over. You could do like me and get a nice pc laptop that has a legit graphics card so you can do renders and stuff in maya or what ever 3d you are using pretty dang quick giving you a portable music and graphics making unit. Nvidia has made a huge leap forward in having high power laptop cards with out chewing through battery and pumping out gallons of heat, I wouldn’t have ever recommenced this before this generation but the gap between desktop and laptop is getting smaller. PC made of quality parts usually last just as long or in my experience longer than my mac counter parts have.
What I will add is there is one huge advantage of a Mac over a PC, and that is resale value.
It’s quite amazing how much you can still get back for a Mac that’s a few years old, whereas a PC of the same age depreciates a lot more.
With that in mind, the value becomes quite similar between the two in the long run.
good point.
resale value is high…
If you keep it in good shape you can get a lot for them.
But…
It makes me wonder if this is for the older macs, that you could at least open up to update ram or a drive or if this will be still valid for the actual models that offer nearly or no way to take care of them by yourself.
I think this is a big drawback and I am not too happy about this development.
iMac is the best performance/price relationship. it’s affordable for the power. Less mobility but I found that ok for some small distance. it’s only 6kg and it fit in a Designer bag.
Rock solid to me with Overbridge. Just look at your drivers availability for every of your hardware that’s all.
could’nt get a reliable arp sync on blofeld on any version of osx or macos, in ableton live 7 up to 9. im quite sure it’s a waldorf issue rather than win/osx> daw issue.
if you decide to get a mac, make sure it does’nt run the latest macos if you intend to use overbridge!
Sure but “building and maintaining computers” must be one of your hobbies if you go down that road. Regular updates can render your hackintosh inoperable from one minute to another.
the rule is
if it runs, don’t update it.
most of the times there is no need to.
I havent’t updated my imac for, like what, years?
Just moved my system to an ssd and that’s it…
get a slightly old mac with all the ports , save £$ 100’s
a friend tried to switch to microsoft surface tablet but he has some issues with that and his audio card,
both might have issues , maybe worth sticking with what you know.
pc’s are easier to switch bits but ive been happy with my imac for many years (once i put ssd into it)
Cubase user here since the late 80’s of the recent century. First on an Atari, later on several PC’s, since 2008 on OSX.
(I have Windows 7 in our office and it annoys me every day…)
OSX runs Cubase quite stable (since 8.5). There were some minor midi enhancements on the last updates but nothing spectacular for musicians. I really like making music on OSX because all my instruments use native USB-support - this is real plug&play I never watched flawlessly on PC.
VST(-3) support on Cubase works fine, whereas people won’t stop moaning about the abandoned VST2 support. I have NI, Steinerg and Aturia - updates are always available some weeks after OSX update. And this is my only point of critizism, OSX becomes more and more a ‘no-brainer-end-user-OS’ with a heavy overload of functionality I never use in music production (siri, photo, icloud sync, etc.)
OB got some trouble at last, I noticed some connection problems in Sierra that didn’t appear in previous versions. From time to time it is neccassary to reconnect USB (AR/A4/AH) and I have no explaination why. But sync is rock solid.
I recommend as much cpu-power as you can get. The last years I was on macbook pro and mac-mini, they were soon limitated with RAM on ever growing VST use. Early this year I got a second hand mac pro and stuffed it up with maximum RAM and a SSD, though only a quad core the speed on USB3 and Thinderbolt2 serves my (firewire-)interface at its best, the mtt-hubs as well. Compared to an equally equiped PC it is almost the same price (if not a beat cheaper) but it very, very quiet and doesn’t heat up in a way you could cook eggs on its surface.
All in all it’s the best decision you can make to switch on a mac in such a situation.
Thx a ton for the input everybody.
I build my own PCs since I was 14 and my system is pretty solid. 4790K @ 4.7, 32GB RAM, SSD’s, GTX 970 G1 all liquid cooled. I know how to tweak Windows since the 95 days haha.
Drivers can be a pain occasionally I agree but for most part they’ve treated me well. In the end there is always a workaround.
Value depreciation isn’t that big of a issue because i switch part by part not the whole thing at once.
But what you guys are saying pretty much is that I have to downgrade to an older machine and then have to be careful what I can / can’t update and that’s what I hoped wasn’t necessary. My idea was to get the latest iMac but looks like I can’t as they all come preloaded with new OS.
You can downgrade if iMac model are compatible with OS version you looking for… (You can find information regarding that on Apple / Google.) Just find the MacAppStore file in direct download or contact apple support and they will give a link to get the version you want.
I don’t know if it was just me but I had issues on my iMac with Overbridge. I don’t know if it was OB itself but my suspicion was that it was the Fusion Drive. My suggestion would be if you go the iMac route and plan to do audio work just get a straight SSD rather than a Fusion, and avoid any of the headaches that come with it managing its files between its blended ssd and spin up drive. I also noticed the hdd slowed down over the years as they do so yeah definitely go SSD.
All other things considered I shifted from PC to the Mac platform over a decade ago and haven’t looked back. Apple are always quick to support and fix issues related to audio (and they do happen) with every new software update, you can usually bet they have a fix out soon if it affects you. I personally love the Mac platform and all of the underlying core applications that make the system run, it means often I’m spending zero time managing any kind of driver or systems based maintenance and just getting on with the job (particularly the management of viruses, spyware and bloatware - which put a distaste in my mouth for the Windows platform, perhaps for life. This is a non event on Mac).