Hey there,

I'm thinking about getting a mac & reason, primarily for use with a midi keyboard for live performance. I like the potential to have a whole library full of professional quality sounds, and tweak parameters on the fly using midi knobs and so on.

My question is which mac you would recommend for this. I'm trying to decide between the macbook, the macbook pro, and I've started considering a mac mini since they're so dang portable anyway. My gut feeling is to just spend spend spend and get a macbook pro, just for the security of knowing it's not going to have latency issues when I'm playing live, but realistically I'm going to be using one or two sounds layered ninety percent of the time, so surely it can't be that processor intensive.

Thoughts?

I have a mac mini and have shelved it since it only has 512 ram. It's unfortunate, cause I kind of like it better than my laptop, but the laptop blows the mini out of the water spec wise.

My only suggestion is get as MUCH ram as possible since the mac mini I have chokes on some of the demo songs. The laptop (2gb ram) I have absolutely no problems with whatsoever. Best of luck

I have a 512MB Ram windows, and it would crash every now and then, but reason works perfectly on my 1GBRam 3.5Ghz P4 Desktop

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Get a macbook pro. If you're shelling out the money it takes to get a mac anyway, you might as well get the one that will last longer, and if you get into using other programs, it'll be good to have the extra firepower and larger screen of the pro. Running audio applications is insanely easier on a mac, especially a fast one. No hard feelings to PC users, I understand the pros of that system, but the various problems I see people encountering on almost every audio software forum (reason, logic, pro tools, nuendo) are almost always with PC users, and are almost always the most bizarre and frustrating problems I've ever even heard of. Again, much love to my PC brothers and sisters out there.

On the bright side, Reason is built like A TANK so it does run great on both platforms If I had my choice I would be mac'ing it up, but I've already got the pc and mac is muy expensive

Well - I have never had any problems running Reason on my PC. And I dont have the money to buy those highly overpriced Apples.

I don't see why you should buy a Mac for Reason, it works just as well on windows which supports more programs anyhow.

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Doesn't really have anything to do with Reason being specifically used on macs, I just like macs better. Luckily, Reason works well on both platforms regardless

I absolutely agree that reason works very well on both platforms. All I was trying to illustrate is that if one wishes to get into the "pro" audio world and has the funds, working on the mac platform is generally less troublesome (depending on the program). Go into any pro studio (by "pro" I mean one with large format console) and you might find a PC in the office, but you will not find one in the control room being used as the main computer. You can definately do much more on the windows platform, many mac users now put it on a partition of their hard drive for games and tax software, among other things. Windows is also great for music production, pretty much every brand of audio software except the latest versions of logic support the windows platform, and one can make great sounding recordings on a PC. But PCs require extraordinary amounts of upkeep compared to a mac when being used for many hours a day doing extremely demanding audio recording, editing, and mixing (and sampling/synthesis). Don't get me wrong, macs need upkeep too, but in that environment its a lot less. Plus most other studios run mac, and transferring pro tools and nuendo files is not nearly as bad as it used to be, but it still can be a headache sometimes. Sorry for the rant, but one last thing: I know that macs are extremely pricey compared to PC (I took out a loan to by my latest) but macs last longer, my last mac worked perfectly on every new OS that came out for 6 years before I upgraded. And less drivers, less viruses.

sorry for the rant, no disrespect to PC users

and you guys get sweet free plugins

Actually you are totally true lol, but for me, MS all the way baby!

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