mac music production

logic or cubase?

[humpingdan]

Hi,

i know this is a forum for Mac webmasters but im in need of a bit of advice from mac users, hope you can help!

We've recently bough 50 - G5 power macs, 2.7ghz dual, 2gb ram, and the rest as standard.

Were looking to use them in a clasroom enviroment to teach 12 - 16 yr olds music production and such like. We cannot decide which software is best for the job, teachers of the subject have limited experience in cubase and reason so a switch to logic would not effect things in anyway.

What i need to know or the advantage or disadvantages to each peiece of software in the above context. Which would you go with if you had to teach a group or teenagers to produce music?

Thanks

[whoisgregg]

If no one speaks up with experience, you could ask the users of each products user forum.

Cubase: [steinberg.de...]
Reason: [propellerheads.se...]
Logic: [apple.com...] (List Bottom Right)

[DerekH]

to produce music

There's the rub. What do you mean?
Doing MIDI?
Doing audio editing?
Typesetting music?
Arranging music?

I have Cubase SX running on MacOs X and I can't stand it - I'm firmly living in the past and running Cubase 4.5.2 on MacOs 9! Cubase has definitely "gone off" a bit since 4.5.2, though SX is less prone to crash, exchanging catastrophic failure for a whole raft of quirks and cumbersome and obscure "anomalies" like being unable to set the page margins (a "feature" in SX1 which shows how little testing they do!)

For me, despite all that, Cubase is the only way to integrate *all four* of the aspects of music production.

Sibelius is arguably better at the last two if you don't need an integrated approach, and if you are teaching music, rather than what is pompously called music technology (when actually it's nothing more than learning to drive an electronic tape recorder!)

DerekH

[xxpeglegxx]

I would go with pro tools... for $400 you get the hardware and the software. it is the easiest and most strait forward of all of them. Also its the one that all major pro studios use. I work at a professional recording studio in NYC and I would never use any thing else.

Steve
pureish.com

[chueewowee]

I use Logic and prefer it for certain reasons. I have used all the major software packages. Logic is the most flexible. Therefore it suits muscicians as bands and composers of day, film music etc..

Because its flexible (ie the environement) flexibility takes getting used to, although, it actually works out of the box simple, no messing about needed, and is straight forward. So use that. But there's so much moer power under the hood, a lifetime's tool for all.

Otherwise, for the class protools would do fine.

[grantmoney]

i'd probably start of using something like garageband, especially if it's for students who might not have any previous experience with making music.

although logic/cubase/nuendo are great, the learning curve is pretty high, and you'll find that kids don't want to spend 2 weeks learning keycommands, they just want to make some noise.

if you want to eventually move them onto something a little more flexible, i'd recommend logic over nuendo/cubase/etc as i find emagic/apple's ui friendlier than steinbergs. having said that though, cubase is probably an easier program to get started on, but i've never liked the steinberg way of doing things :)