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I just recently bought a PowerMac Cube for my studio. I was getting frustrated with the Dual Pentium II running Windows 2000 that I was using. My first beef with the Pentium Computer was it was loud. It had a 2 Gig IDE Drive and a 4 Gig SCSI drive in it. I was mainly using the computer to check email between students, record lessons, encode lessons as MP3s, and to print off any copies of music that I had prepared for students.

The “Cube” does all that and more…….

My first praise of the Cube is it is small. I mean really, it is a joy to look at and it hardly takes up any room. Second praise is that it is practically silent. I can BARELY hear the hard drive. No fans, nada.

I’m currently using FeltTip Sound Studio 1.5.5 either running OS 9.1 or OS X. The Cube flies under OS 9.1. The problem with OS 9.1 is that the encoding software that I like, LAME does run under OS 9.1. I have successfully compiled the sources to LAME under OS X and everything works great. Also, Finale runs great on OS 9.1. Real fast and responsive. Under OS X, it kinda lags. It runs, but you have to run the Classic Environment, and then, I haven’t yet been able to figure out how to get it to print from the classic Environment.

For recording, like I said, FeltTip’s Sound Studio is great for the job. It’s fast, and very robust. Editing sound files seems a lot faster on the 450Mhz Cube than the 500Mhz Pentium III that I have at home. I even have a separate scratch disk on the Pentium III, and the Cube seems faster. I have not actually measured the speed, but cuting and pasting seems a lot faster. I use SoundForge 4.5 on the PC. Sound Studio on the Mac even handles things well while being in the background in OS 9.1, which usually causes programs problems.

Another part of the studio is Griffin Technology’s iMic. iMic is a USB audio interface that works as either a microphone input or a line input. I’ve tried it both ways, and it works great. It also has support for output as well, which I have not tried yet. I need to go get some more cables.

The Cube also has FireWire. And, with the addition of a FireWire CDRW, I can copy some of my playing CDs for the kids right there, in about 4 minutes. I have even heard of FireWire Mixers and stuff, but, I don’t need that……yet.

OS X is going to be the choice of my operating system. Why? Cause it multitasks well. Windows 2000 did a good job too. Especially on a Dual processor system. On the Windows machine, I could encode a MP3 and still record and check my email without bogging down the computer. My Pentium III at home, however, gets bogged down when I record using SoundForge, and encode using the Lame Encoder. I sometimes get GAPS in the recordings because of this. I have YET to have this happen on OS X. Partly because the Application, Sound Studio, was “Carbonized” for OS X, and partly because OS X is a true Multitasking OS. I’ve recorded, encoded, surfed (using IE 5.1), and checked email all under OS X and everything was fine. I wonder what it would be like with 2 processors……..hmmmmm….

Anyways, if your looking for something for your studio that is small, quiet, and powerful, check out a cube. Apple is not dead at all. They have some slick stuff that creative people should check out.