IPad or Android?

Gear
22

This thread isn’t about the iMac, it is about the iPad. Those are very different things, even the OS is different.

If you compare Android and iPad for music production, it seems that iPad wins by a great margin.

If you are looking at a Macbook, the story becomes very different, because you would run it against a Laptop with Windows or Linux on it. Both of those OSes do not fall behind in music stuff.

If there is still some aura around the Mac being the music production tool, that stems from history: Back in the day, before Mac OS X, Mac OS had cooperative multitasking. Totally awful in general (if an application crashes, it takes down the whole system), but awesome for real time work, because an application can hog the processor as long as it wants to.

Those days are gone now, and whatever advantage the Mac might have today over Windows here is only in the software, which as far as I know exists widely on both systems, so no advantage there.

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23

This. The only severe reason atm. to choose iOS over Windows is Logic Pro. iOS used to be the obvious choice because of the system stability. (Or Windows instability… ) But now, it’s really about 1) personal choice 2) already existing user’s Apple ecosystem.

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24

I love linux to death. I use it every day and always have a linux machine. So I really hate to say this, but Linux falls vastly far behind either the Mac or Windows machines when it comes to music production, much like it does for gaming, in terms of software selection. Unless you’re going to VM it, in which case it doesn’t count, or being able to get stuff to barely work. Native there is very little choice.

(Trust me - I tried hard with gaming, including over two years of running Steam in WineX and trying to get titles to work well.)

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25

I think 2015 is a good starting year. @T_dub did some research too. Mac mini’s are the cheapest solution to get started with mac.

Well at least MacOS is based on Unix. I still do a bit of stuff with the Terminal on my mac. I used to play in Suse and Redhat.

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26

Thanks @Paul

I actually do have a new laptop with Windows on it but I’ve been told that?? ( I’ve even forgotten the name of the recording app) is easier to use on Mac.

Edit

GarageBand it’s called GarageBand :exploding_head:

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27

I think Garage band is only available on iOS as it’s Apples own product. It’s by default even on iPhones. And it works like a charm on my old iPhone 8S, so I guess any Mac of last 4 5 years should do.

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28

Thank you @wellbi
I’m really wanting to join in with the covers thread and so far I’m just hitting problems

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29

I think John’s and Pam’s session on recording etc. at Saturday should be really helpful to your needs.

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30

You’ll want a mac of 2015 or newer so that you can get the latest OS version; otherwise it’s a PITA regarding the app store and supported software. I forget the exact models, I looked it up for Toby in the thread where he was considering it.

Here’s the macbooks (for anything serious you’ll want a pro, not an air)

Here’s the minis:

iMacs:

Late 2015 or later is a good rule of thumb for all of them.

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31

I heard on Windows the program “Cakewalk” has similar ease of use, but never tried it myself:

As far as I know, you can use that program without using their Cloud platform.

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32

Cakewalk Sonar isn’t bad. It’s been around a long time and Bandlab bought it. It comes with a nice drum VSTi for free too.

I don’t think it’s as easy as GB but it’s definitely a full featured DAW and it’s totally free so no reason to avoid snagging it.

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33

Thank you @howard @wellbi and @Malyngo
I’ll have a look at band lab and cakewalk as well as having a look at the newer iMacs

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34

At the end of the day it’s the user experience that separates good and not so good os and platform. Sure many apps are offer across all of the platforms but, but, since Apple iOS dominates the market their version gets updated and optimized first before android.

Unless you get a rare unicorn google pixel “vanilla” with no other brands enhanced you don’t get the os updates when the new android version come out. It’s much better than before but it’s still lagging. Big brands like Samsung May be days or weeks but smaller brands try months.

I don’t like to tweak my iOS devices so Apple works well for me and the ecosystem offers seamless experience. The free GarageBand is quite powerful it smokes my DigiDesign Session8, and I paid four grand for that plus we each sold a kidney to max out the ram to 16mb, you read that right, lol.

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