Onizuka said:
Soundtrack Pro isn't necessarily for music editing so much as soundtrack editing to video. Buy Logic Express or Pro or Ableton Live instead.
The 20 Inch display is awesome. I touch mine innappropriately every day.
Get the 699 mac mini. It'll last you quite some time, it's powerful enough to run the music software you want. Then, in a year from now when you wanna buy an intel based system, throw the mac mini into your Home Theater system.
Thanks for the advice Onizuka (including others who posted too). Would you happen to know if Logic Express was anything like Sony Acid Music Studio on the PC? I really thought that program was great, but since my computer got all this Spyware recently (like VirtualBouncer and all these Aurora popups come up), I have become sick of using a Windows PC. I'm going to have to pass on Ableton Live since it looks really complicated and the $500 price point (I think it's around there) seems a bit high for the kind of amateur music "production" I want to do. Thanks for the suggestion, though.
I only hear great things about the 20" Apple Cinema Display. As far as I'm concerned, I'm sold on buying it, although there have been debates about getting the Dell 2005FPW instead, but aesthetics are really important to me (albeit the possibly unjustified premium I am paying for the ACD). I have heard, though, that the 23" ACD has a lot of QC problems with it, so hopefully the shortcomings on the latter won't affect the 20" ACDs.
On a side note, I must say that it is quite frustrating that I can't use my new iBook to be externally displayed on a monitor with a resolution higher than 1024x768. I read about the screen spanning hack software, but it seems a little too risky.
