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.
_______________________________________________
Harp-L is sponsored by SPAH, http://www.spah.org
Harp-L@xxxxxxxxxx
http://harp-l.org/mailman/listinfo/harp-l