I have a question concerning the suitability of the following setup of logic studio: macbook - 2 gH Core 2 duo, 4 GB 800Mhz ddr2 sdram belkin firewire hub connecting to 2 500gb G drives (1 for audio, 1 for samples) Is this a comfortable configuration or am I pushing the limits? Anything else I should be looking at to insure good performance? Thanks

Hi & welcome to the forums :) The setup sounds decent. But what would comfortable mean for you? Difficult to know if you will be pushing the limits of this setup unless we know more about how many tracks you wish to record simultaneously... the type of music you wish to create/produce... an idea of track count, working with audio or Software Instruments (virtual instruments) or combination of the two. There are a lot of factors, but one thing I see right off is it's important to get a fast HD if possible. FW400 / 800 are both great and the speed of 7,200rpm is important. Get 1 good HD for your samples and projects in the beginning. You can always buy another HD down the line or use a slower HD to backup your projects to. Have you considered an audio interface and Monitors and controllers (MIDI Keyboard) yet? Again, these are elements that you can add to your setup as you go. Thanks Rounik

Thanks for the suggestions. I have an Maudio 1814 audio interface. I will be recording chill downtempo stuff as well as recording my band's songs live (prog rock). I would guess I will have anywhere between 10 and 20 tracks. By comfortable I guess I mean I don't want to worry about latency issues. I suppose I can always bounce tracks when I need to but I want to avoid that if possible. I was running Reason and Rewire on a windows machine and had a number of problems which is why I went with a Mac. I suppose running lots of plugins eats processing power. I guess I will have to see how it goes. I will take your advice about the 1 hd and I suppose there will be no problems running it from a firewire hub which also has my audio interface plugged in right? Thanks Don

Hi Don, Sounds like it should be ok... although make sure the macbook has firewire. Some older models do... and if possible I would consider a macbookpro. Latency depends on a number of factors, but while recording you can decrease the Buffer I/O Size (latency) and always increase it during the mixing stage. Freezing tracks (bouncing to audio) is a very simple process in Logic and a pretty flexible procedure. Some plugins are more processor intensive than others... again there are ways to decrease the negative impact this can have on your Mac.... increase the latency would work well as well as sharing effects... e.g. routing the signal from, let's say, multiple drum tracks to a single Reverb effect rather than having multiple reverbs on each drum track. Basically there are many ways to make different systems work :) I'm not familiar with the 1814, so couldn't recommend whether it will run well when plugged into a firewire hub. Might be worth asking M-Audio directly to see what they recommend... but many audio interfaces run fine either sharing a hub with a HD or plugged in to an external HD's spare firewire port. Hope that helps some more! Rounik