Re: [Harp-L] Home recording

[Ken Deifik <kenneth.d@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> the reason so many music pros use Mac is Firewire I believe.

There are two reasons that I'm not so sure this is true.

First there was a period of time, from the late 80's until around 1995, 
when Macs were capable of some multitracking, but PCs were not.  (I'm not 
even sure Macs could multitrack until the early 90's but it was before the 
PC could.)  With the advent of Win95 and faster hardware, Samplitude was 
ported over from the Amiga and that was no longer a problem.

In essence, Mac got there first.  It's been increasing returns since then 
for Mac vis a vis the recording studio.  Even studios that came on line 
long after "Macs are for artists" became a canard had every reason to go 
with what became the industry standard.  If I owned a studio it'd be a 
Protools/Mac studio.  Interoperability is a smaller factor, and the fact 
that most engineers are trained on Protools is a very big factor, even 
though Samplitude works nearly identically.  Not only can a professional 
engineer get up to speed much faster with identical software, but he or she 
will have is a large base of colleagues to consult on any issues that might 
arise.

Second, while I'm sure that firewire transfers are important in some 
recording applications, I do lots of work in studios that I have to take 
home with me, and no firewire nor USB 2.0 wire transfer is 
necessary.  Disks are burned.  I did a session last night where I need to 
build some loops for the followup, so the engineer burned me a disk before 
I could tell him he could just put the wavs on my USB drive.

By the way, all the studios I work in are Mac/Protools shops and yet when I 
bring the wavs home I load 'em onto my PC and into Samplitude.  Then back 
to the Mac and Protools.  The method for doing this is a no-brainer.  If 
anyone needs to know how, contact me offline, but once I explain it you'll 
realize that you already know how to do it.

If outboard equipment is connected via firewire these days, that'd make 
Robert's case for him.  I do not know how that stuff is done.