iMac; MOTU Digital Performer

Martin Russ puts the new iMacs in context, and delves further into his new G3.

Sometimes things just aren't easy to interpret. Apple followed their announcement of the G4 with some iMac news, and it's the targeting of the two ranges that is getting confusing. Previously, it seemed that the iMac was the entry‑level, home and small‑business Macintosh, whilst the desktop 'minitower' G‑series machines were targeted at the serious business and professional market. Musicians fall somewhere between these two camps, with the iMac being at the lower end, and lacking some of the features that you would expect for music (such as PCI expandability, perhaps), whilst the G3 and high‑end G4 have enough power to make the 'sound studio in a computer box' less of a pipe‑dream, and more of a reality.

However, the new iMacs aren't just speed‑bumped versions of the original, as was the case with previous new models. This time, there are subtle changes to the casing, such as a slot‑loading CD/DVD drive. The case itself is now available in a much more transparent, rather than translucent, form, including a special edition in the graphite G4 colour. Inside the case is a new digital hi‑fi audio system designed by Apple and Harman/Kardon, plus the new AGP 2X Rage graphics accelerator. The iMac Standard (available in blueberry, blueberry or, er, blueberry) comes with a 350MHz G3 processor, 100MHz buss, 64Mb of RAM as standard, and a 1Mb backside cache. What's missing is the DVD drive, video ports and FireWire interface now found on the 400MHz G3 iMac DV and DV Special Edition. One thing which is now gone from all iMacs is the fan — a development which suddenly makes the iMac quiet enough for studio environments where you might previously have not considered it.

One thing which is now gone from all iMacs is the fan — a development which suddenly makes the iMac quiet enough for studio environments where you might previously have not considered it.

The DV reference is the cause of my confusion, since here you have a home product which seems to be moving upwards into the digital video world with its FireWire port, newly independent USB ports, DVD‑ROM drive, video ports and iMovie software (cut down from Apple's pro‑level Final Cut Pro video editor). Now I know that lots of home and small‑business users might be tempted to dabble in making their own videos, but I'm still surprised at Apple's decision to make the whole focus of the top of the iMac range so video‑oriented. As a side‑effect, an iMac DV SE with a 400MHz G3 processor, 128Mb of RAM, 13Gb drive and FireWire ought to be quite useful for musical purposes, by using the USB ports for the audio and MIDI (or maybe even the FIreWire ports one day...). I know that there are questions about the latency of USB for professional use, but if you want a low‑cost, powerful Macintosh, and music is one of the applications, then your answer may be here.

Things MOTU

I said I would be exploring my G3, and I've now installed MOTU's Digital Performer 2.6, FreeMIDI and a MegaWolf Romulus 4 serial‑port card into my G3. Installation proceeded remarkably easily, and I was even impressed with the utility CD‑R that Hinton Instruments supplied with the MegaWolf card — a CD‑R with a customised set of software aimed at my likely uses, and not an out‑of‑date mass‑produced coffee mat. My only niggle with the G3 has nothing to do with any of the music software or hardware, but concerns an annoying lock‑up that happens when you try to drag a file on the desktop, but accidentally drop it mid‑way.

It's a few years sinceI reviewed the original Digital Performer on a Mac Plus, and I am still rather struck by the way that, then as now, MOTU's user interface is one of the most graphically sophisticated I've seen. When I did a brief round‑up of plug‑in technologies some months ago, moreover, I did not include MOTU's MAS (MOTU Audio System), so this is a good time to say that one of the plug‑in systems that I'm investigating in the background is now available for MAS: Cycling 74's Pluggo. At the risk of spoiling the potential contents of a future article, Pluggo allows you to make your own plug‑ins — and not trite, hackneyed customisations of basic EQ, chorus or echoes. Rather, Pluggo provides a complete signal‑processing environment that allows sophisticated plug‑ins to be produced, and it is very deep, versatile and powerful.

Last month, I mentioned that software would need some reworking to take full advantage of the special acceleration possibilities offered by the Velocity Engine in Apple's new G4 Macs (Bitheadz were one of the first companies to announce G4 VE support for their software synthesis products). Barely was the ink dry when MOTU announced G4 support in Digital Performer at the New York AES. The Velocity Engine should boost the performance of some computationally intense operations, such as the DSP processing found in eVerb and many of Digital Performer's other native real‑time effects plug‑ins. MOTU has reported dramatic gains for some plug‑ins in the amount of processing available to G4 users.