I am getting pretty serious about recording and producing my own music. I am fairly sure that I want to start using a Mac. What would be the ideal Mac desktop to buy? My price range ends at about $1500-$2000. Thanks.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Best Mac for music production on a budget
- Thread starter eltico
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
A G5 at least surely?
TBH An Intel Machine will be much better as it'll last much longer as PPC is dead now and the software you want to run in 2-3 years may well not run on PPC Macs.
Even a Intel Mini will be way quicker than a G4 and you can use external HD's for storage (and the RAM limit is the same, 2GB).
I know you said desktop, but you could buy a macbook and get a more useful, portable recording facility. With the change, you could buy a couple of decent mikes and a USB or firewire XLR/line/mic input...
You can get a 20" 2.16GHz iMac C2D, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, for $1,674. This should suffice for your needs (unless you need a larger HDD- which is a $200 upgrade for 500GB). 
Haha, judging from the recommendations, I'll just go with "Any" Mac will do the job great for you as long as its in your budget.
I would even say an Intel Mini would work great.
I would even say an Intel Mini would work great.
Well he told us his budget, and if he is as serious about recording music as he says he is I doubt he would want to use a G4. I say either go for a MB or an iMac depending if the portability factor would be helpful.
My son upgraded his ProTools rig from a G4/Digi001 to an iMac G5 20"/Digi002R and was blown away by the improvement in performance.
An iMac Intel with modern recording software is a great unit. Just budget for some additional external Firewire drive space.
An iMac Intel with modern recording software is a great unit. Just budget for some additional external Firewire drive space.
I am running Logic 7.2 very well in my 24" imac (2.33Ghz, 2 Gig ram, 500 Gig HD) This is a great machine that I push to the limit on a consistent basis! You have a lot of screen "real estate" for opening multiple windows and tweaking plugins in the arrange page. Regardless of what you decide to get i HIGHLY recommend to by an INTEL based machine. Many plug in manufacturers are making the "move" away from the PPC macs.