N00b switching to Mac

The cheap macs are plenty powerful for most uses, just load up on ram, which I think is extra expensive and I don't know if you can install yourself as easily as you could with a mac pro. The cheapest imac is a 2 ghz core 2 dual. I have the first 1.8 single processor G5 powermac and I'm running Digital Performer 5 with plug-ins and whatnot, I do some pretty heavy Quark/Adobe CS2 stuff....it's not the zippiest system around, but it's still pretty good. You're gonna want/need way more then 1 gig of ram though.

Cool... I guess I'll make sure to upgrade the amount of RAM when I buy it. I wasn't sure if 1 Gig would cut it either, then I looked up how annoying it would be to put more RAM in myself... I guess I'll go up to 2 gigs.

Uh I guess I can ask this question in here:

I bought Logic Audio 6 when I bought my Powerbook, like 4 years ago. My Powerbook's hard drive just died this past weekend, and when I got it back from the Apple store with a fresh new hard drive, Logic was no longer on the computer. I still have the USB key thing but I cannot find the installation disk anywhere, I'm assuming it got lost or tossed sometime in the past four years. I have emailed Emagic, which made the version of Logic Audio I bought, but since Apple has since taken over this product and Emagic doesn't really seem to exist anymore, I don't have much hope for hearing back from them. Any idea where I could get a copy of the installation disk/program for Logic Audio 6?

Here are some follow-up questions if the above is impossible:

All I'm looking for right now is a program that I can use to record in music from my 8-track and convert it a WAV or MP3. I'm having this music mastered so I don't need any effects or compression or anything, just straight recording and conversion.
a) Is Garageband ok for this function or does it "color" the music like iTunes does?
b) Any recommended freeware/shareware I can use for this function?

I guess these are kind of dumb questions, I'm just kind of freaked out by this and pissed off that I lost that program. I guess I could call the Apple store and yell at them for losing the program and see if they'll upgrade me.

If you're getting RAM (which you should), it's generally much cheaper to buy it yourself from Crucial.com (fitting is easy: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306204) rather than as an upgrade from Apple.

How easy is it to install ram in an iMac though?

About the above...why not see if you can purchase an upgrade from your version of Logic to one of Apples? If you still have the registration number you could end up getting expensive software cheap.

But if you're looking for something free and clean and easy to use, I'm a big fan of Audacity. I don't know if Garageband is OK or not. Are you mixing down to the computer or want to convert each track to it's own digital channel? That would need a multi-channel firewire interface. Not sure if Audacity can record multitrack audio.

How easy is it to install ram in an iMac though?

Trivial : ) http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306204

turns out our drummer went out and bought logic pro 8 today for cheap with his office discount, so we are set

Oh wow. I thought it was much harder to install RAM, I was looking at the instructions for the old iMacs here:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=43012

Now I can spend less, get the ram somewhere else and install it myself... nice.

Btw, at least on the Windows version I've used, Audacity is great. It'll probably do what you need it to, from what you described. Looking at it now, it seems you can use a multichannel recording source, so it will probably work. If it doesn't, it's free and open source, so no loss.

my computer is too weak for Logic 8. when i tried to install it, a long list of all the reasons it wouldn't work on my computer (not enough RAM, not fast enough, etc.) popped up. so i am going to try audacity instead, which looks like just what i need.

Audacity is great. I've edited a few of the key commands to make more sense to me and use it for tons of stuff. Especially when I'm digitizing records and I want to clean up the beginning and end with edits/fades, remove a few bad pops and normalize, then save as mp3 or aiff.

Beyond that, after having a bootleg copy for a few years that I lost during a crash, I just bought Digital Performer, but that's another story.

I found tumult's long comment here quite useful in getting to grips with audio on the Mac: http://ask.metafilter.com/22178/Music-software-for-OS-X#356427

A technical question: I'm probably going to get a 2GB stick to supplement the 1GB that comes standard. By not using a matched pair, I know it stops Dual Channel mode from being used - is this a major real-world performance hit? Enough to make me step down to a 1GB uprade, or up to 4GB (2x2GB) to make sure I have a matched pair?

That metafilter link was interesting, but I'm too dumb right now to understand half of it. Most of my experience is in software trackers (which I'm really trying to get away from). :/

I'm pretty sure it doesn't come with a 1GB stick as standard. It comes with 2x512. Sell those and replace with 2x1GB.

Yeah, http://www.apple.com/macbook/specs.html:

"1GB (two 512MB SO-DIMMs) of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (PC2-5300); two SO-DIMM slots support up to 4GB"

More ILX tracker massive!

(yeah no I don't even make music any more, just lurk IMM waiting for moments where I can say that, or ask super-dumb questions about gear I'm not going to buy and wouldn't use if I did)

More iMac drama! (I'm going for that, not the MacBook. And yeah, I know this is getting really off-topic for this forum) I decided I'll probably go all the way and soup it up to 4 GB (try some Windows virtualization, too) since it's only $100-125ish going through newegg. (That's 8 times the amount of RAM I have in this computer!)

Then I started reading up on the aluminum iMac screen issues and how the brightness/gradients are fucked up. Uck. So I have to figure out if I'm anal enough to be bother by the screen issue eventually (4:1 odds in favor). There are reports of people returning their iMacs 3, 4 times and still getting bad ones. Of course I could always step back 6 months and get one of those previous models, the white intel iMacs... Bah.

So uh, on topic... why do some midi controllers have less keys but cost more? Is the extra portability that makes it cost extra? I mean like a $99 M-Audio 49-key one vs. one that costs twice as much but has more knobs but has a few 25 keys.