Ashley Pomeroy
New member
First post. I use a Windows PC to make music, using a mixture of Audiomulch and Ableton Live. Out of nostalgia I recently bought a dirt-cheap old G4 PowerBook, because I've always wanted an old PowerPC Macintosh, and I wonder what kind of sequencing software would work with it. Out of nostalgia, mainly - for the novelty of it rather than seriously, but it would be amusing to squeeze music out of something so old, and of course people did back in the very early 2000s. It's basically the first-but-one titanium G4 running at 500mhz, the naff one with a VGA port and no built-in sound input.
It's way, way behind the curve and would have been obsolete in the mid-2000s; I don't expect miracles, in fact I would be surprised if it can run more than a couple of virtual instruments at once. However back in 2000, 2001 I remember using Cubase VST32 and earlier versions of Audiomulch on an old Pentium III and although I had to be very careful I could play live. In the blank space just below this paragraph there was a link to a track I recorded live way back in 2001 using Audiomulch, essentially sample playback and effects etc, which I can't post because it's my first message.
In retrospect it could have been half the length without losing anything; it's very static (Audiomulch has always had very limited sequencing, hence my move to Ableton). The Mac runs 10.4.11 Tiger with 1gb of memory. Reading through these forums and old issues of Sound on Sound it looks as if Notator Logic Pro 6 and early versions of Cubase SX were the standard back then and would at least run. I know very little about Sonar and ProTools. My hunch is that early versions of Albeton would work but they seem very limited compared to the Ableton I am familiar with. These very forums pointed me to a free version of Cubase LE 1.0.8 which I will have to try out. At a pinch I could simply use the machine as a MIDI sequencer, with old-fashioned physical instruments. Albeit that this version of the PowerBook doesn't have a built-in audio input, something I'll have to work with. Hopefully the Xonar U3 I have sitting around doing nothing has OS X drivers.
Obviously the logical solution is to toss the machine in the bin and forget about it, but that would be boring. eBay here in the UK has a boxed copy of Logic Pro 7, but my impression is that it won't work very well with a 500mhz G4. This raises the question of whether any of this old software is still on sale, or if (say) buying a licence for a modern lite version of Cubase lets me download older versions of the software.
Was there ever a Mac equivalent of Audiomulch? Did any of you play live or sequence with equivalent Macintosh hardware back in the day? How did you do it?
It's way, way behind the curve and would have been obsolete in the mid-2000s; I don't expect miracles, in fact I would be surprised if it can run more than a couple of virtual instruments at once. However back in 2000, 2001 I remember using Cubase VST32 and earlier versions of Audiomulch on an old Pentium III and although I had to be very careful I could play live. In the blank space just below this paragraph there was a link to a track I recorded live way back in 2001 using Audiomulch, essentially sample playback and effects etc, which I can't post because it's my first message.
In retrospect it could have been half the length without losing anything; it's very static (Audiomulch has always had very limited sequencing, hence my move to Ableton). The Mac runs 10.4.11 Tiger with 1gb of memory. Reading through these forums and old issues of Sound on Sound it looks as if Notator Logic Pro 6 and early versions of Cubase SX were the standard back then and would at least run. I know very little about Sonar and ProTools. My hunch is that early versions of Albeton would work but they seem very limited compared to the Ableton I am familiar with. These very forums pointed me to a free version of Cubase LE 1.0.8 which I will have to try out. At a pinch I could simply use the machine as a MIDI sequencer, with old-fashioned physical instruments. Albeit that this version of the PowerBook doesn't have a built-in audio input, something I'll have to work with. Hopefully the Xonar U3 I have sitting around doing nothing has OS X drivers.
Obviously the logical solution is to toss the machine in the bin and forget about it, but that would be boring. eBay here in the UK has a boxed copy of Logic Pro 7, but my impression is that it won't work very well with a 500mhz G4. This raises the question of whether any of this old software is still on sale, or if (say) buying a licence for a modern lite version of Cubase lets me download older versions of the software.
Was there ever a Mac equivalent of Audiomulch? Did any of you play live or sequence with equivalent Macintosh hardware back in the day? How did you do it?
