ibook question

[guyute]

I am considering switching from a pc to a mac setup. I am considering purchasing a 1.6 g5 for home and an ibook for portability. My question is will the ibook handle music recording and will it handle much video? Thanks for any advise.

 

[SilentPanda]

Yes and Yes. Putting video onto the iBook will take the same amount of time as it would on the PowerMac since you generally do that in real time. Editing is definitely doable (although it'll be faster on your G5) but not a problem.

Recording music works fine too providing you record one track at a time (although I don't know how you'd record more than one on a G5).

 

[zimv20]

you don't mention what program(s) you use to record, but i'll give you my findings, posted in another thread a long, long time ago in a galaxy (never mind):

i wanted to see what my ibook was capable of wrt simultaneous recording and playback w/ PTLE. here's the gear:

- 12" g3 ibook, 800 MHz, 640 RAM, osx 10.2.6
- digi002 rack w/ latest firmware
- PTLE 6.1.2
- QPS Que M3 external firewire drive, 60 gig, 7200 rpm, 2 meg buffer, 8.9 msec seek

test setup:

- 8 mics going into digi002r
- 96kHz sample rate w/ 24-bit word lengths
- PTLE playback engine at 99% (all other settings defaulted)
- no plugins
- no other user-started processes running (except the occasional 'top')
- all tracks recorded to 5 minutes

test:

- record 8 simultaneous tracks w/ playback (first time had no playback)
- play back all recorded tracks
- repeat until something breaks

results:

- successfully recorded 8 tracks while playing back 16
- successfully played back 24 tracks
- failed to record additional tracks while playing back 24

observations:

- the ibook got hot
- playback of 24 tracks used between 30-85% CPU
- some graphic disruptions while recording the 2nd set of 8; a relaunch of PTLE fixed this
- PTLE finally gave up recording w/ an error message saying the fw drive was too busy or a connection had been lost
- the fw drive was accessing about 90% during the final (failed) test (i.e. play back 24, record any additional)
- resultant audio took up 1.94 gig on drive

the results of this test satisfy me that i can use my ibook to record reasonably-sized remote gigs. i'm happy that i don't have to purchase a powerbook anytime soon.