I'm going to be buying a new computer soon and my main concern is its capability to run music software. It seems that Macs have always been the leader in the arts. Any thoughts on this?

Hi Jenny,

It used to be true that Macs tended to surpass PC's when it came to graphics/image manipulation and music.

That really doesn't apply any longer (at least for music), and I'd say that the situation has shifted in favor of the PC, since certain really cool programs are not (yet?) available for Mac.

Programmers tend to support PC first, since it's just a matter of numbers: they'll develop software for the largest group of users first.

The newer Mac stuff has some great features (dual processors, etc) that will probably ensure continued support from third-party developers of music software, however. Many are still shying away, due to concerns over running music software with OS X and the Mac's implementation of USB (I recall reading an editorial in 'Sound on Sound' or perhaps 'Keyboard' magazine about 6 months ago where the author was discussing the problem, and was extrememly frustrated).

As a long-time Mac guy, I recently got a PC and found it nice to suddenly have the number of software options dramatically increase. Of course, Windows has become very Mac-like, and the transition wasn't as foreign as you'd think.

Perhaps the best way to approach this is to look at the specific types of software you want to run, trying to demo, and then deciding which platform would give the best results with that particular software.

Fortunately, here's tons of info. on-line addressing these issues: computers and music, sound on sound, etc. have web sites that discuss this stuff. Look in the 'Links' section of this site for more info.

Regards,

Chris

[This message has been edited by feefer (edited 07-14-2001).]