Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

Hi guys,

Sorry for the OT question, but I figured someone(s) here would be able to
answer this. My general question is if anyone knows of an email list or
weblist thing like Yahoo that discusses DAWs.

If anyone can speak to my specific situation, I'd appreciate all the help I
can get (off-list, I suppose). What I want to do is record music and make
CDs. (don't we all :) I've used PC based MIDI sequencers since the days of
Jim Miller's Personal Composer, and am currently using Digital Performer on
an iMac G3/400 (the Indigo generation) running OS 9.2. So far I've done
only small 4-8 track pieces using the built in IDE drive and audio I/O
(which sounded suprisingly better than I expected). I have a firewire CD
burner and Toast 5. So far so good. The next step is to go to better
converters and a separate drive for audio. This is where my questions
start. I've heard that it's good to have a separate audio drive so the main
drive isn't so taxed and cluttered (and therefore less likely to crash).
I've also heard that the standard off-the-shelf firewire drives are too slow
and not designed for the constant reading/writing involved in recording and
playing back multitrack digital audio. At least that's what the ads for
Glyph and others who make "audio specific" hard drives say - and of course
those drives are about 3x as expensive as a comparable "consumer" drive.

So, first question: what's the deal with firewire hard drives - can I use
say a 7200 rpm, 40M/sec drive advertised for "multimedia" or video; or will
it fry itself on multitrack digital audio? (I.e. do I really need something
like the Glyph?)

Second question regards audio interfaces. If money were no object, I'd buy
a MOTU 896 and call it good. I like the simplification of having all MOTU
software and hardware (especially with OS 9 - maybe with OS X it won't be
that big of a deal, but I seriously doubt whether I'll put X on this
machine). However, something like the M-Audio Quattro USB interface is
pretty appealing. It only has 4 ins/outs and no preamps, but is about a
third of the price of the MOTU 828, not to mention the 896. The big
question there is basically, "will it work?". I actually bought a Quattro
last year when they first came out. Then I was using Cakewalk Metro and the
Quattro didn't work at all - not even in standalone mode. I understand
there have been a few driver updates since then and Mac OS updates too, so I
suspect things would be better now. I have a friend with basically my same
setup (G3/400 powerbook) who uses DP3 and MOTU 828 - works perfectly. (As I
would expect).

Does anybody have any experience with either the Quattro (or Duo) or the
828/896 that can give me any advice? Are the other considerations that I'm
missing?

Thanks,
Larry (some other stooge)