Download Visual Studio Code to experience a redefined code editor, optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. Download Visual Studio Code - Mac, Linux, Windows This site uses cookies for analytics, personalized content and ads. This weeks featured Mac setup is the awesome home recording studio of Steve Steele, a professional film composer, musician, and band leader, with some very beefy Apple gear and loads of great music equipment.This isn’t your average home recording studio though, there’s better music gear and hardware here then you’ll find in many professional studios, so let’s dive in and learn a bit. STUDIO ONE https: //shop.presonus.com. How To Build A Home Studio For Under $350. What Other Operating Systems Are There Besides Windows or Mac? - Duration: 12:22. ThioJoe 163,519 views.

The heart of most home studios is the computer, the sacred place where we keep all our music programs and plug-ins.

Many questions from music producers are whether they just have to take an Apple Mac computer or a Windows PC.

“MAC or PC? Which is Best for Music Production?”

My answer is always: “Buy a good system” for both Apple and a (good) PC, as long as it works for you!

It is very similar when people ask me: What is the best music production software / DAW for music production? The best music production software is the one you learn and know best. Each program is good as long as you manage to master it, it is like a wild horse that needs to be tamed.

Let’s get back to our main subject…

MAC or PC?

It is known that in the 90 Apple’s MAC machine dominate the music studios. After 2000’s things have changed, so have appeared more and more computers running on Windows, perhaps because it is cheaper and easier to upgrade. Today it is hard to say which is more popular.

A good, professional studio just needs to have both a Mac and a PC. Very often it happens to work on different projects that were built in specific music programs (MAC or Windows). Many audio and video file types work perfectly on both, such as WAV, AIF, MP3, MOV, AVI, MP4, so it’s quite easy to transfer them from one to another.

Today, most PCs are very powerful and theoretically suitable for making music and recording music.

Both platforms have software that runs only on that particular system. The PC has Sonar, Sound Forge, FL Studio, Adobe Audition. The MAC has Logic, GarageBand, Peak, Soundtrack Pro.

But there’s more…

Both platforms can work with Ableton, Cubase, Nuendo, Pro Tools, Reaper, Bitwig Studio, Digital Performer and a few other. Fortunately, most (but not all) soft synths, effects plugins and soft samplers work on both platforms.

To record some audio tracks in your home, you do not have a heavy system, but you might use many VSTi and VST plugins so you need a good CPU (processor) and at least 4GM of RAM.

Each PC is a different cluster to variables, while the new iMac from Apple has a very large reserve of power for real-time processing.

Another consideration to keep in mind is that these computers generate some noise. Many desktop MACs are very quiet to work. That’s nice if you put it in the same room where you produce music. You can also get your PC silently, by placing other fans, power supplies, and enclosures.

Okay, you’re ready for a new system, but what’s it gonna be? It depends largely on your application, you will use it in a professional studio or in your home studio?

Fortunately, there are music stores (where musicians working and speaking your language) that have knowledge of computers and give this support.

There are various music stores where you will find Apple computers and there are also a few shops that sell PCs that are designed specifically for music production.

I hear you’re thinking: “Why to go in a music store?” Well let’s see:

• They will help you fit into a budget and get the best machine for your needs
• All components are matched and fully compatible
• The Operating System (OS) is properly adjusted for making music
• In some cases, you can get pre-installed music programs (freeware or paid)
• It has been tested for use in the home studio or professional studios
• Support after purchase

But what if you’re on the go? Many people choose a laptop. However, there are only a few specialized Windows laptops available for music production.

Most people on the go you usually choose Apple Macbook Pro, and there is definitely a good reason.

Also see: Best Laptop For Music Production (Buyer’s guide)

Why MAC?

Apple has always had its base in the creative industries, including music production.

Apple computers are well known for their stability, ease of use and good performance.

Today you have a wide choice of Apple models. The Mac Pro is the most used in a professional studio environment. For home studio applications, an iMac or MacBook Pro are more than enough.

There is also a wide range of dedicated audio interfaces, MAC plugins, and music making software like Logic Pro that makes Apple computer a serious candidate for your music studio.

Apple is perceived as expensive compared with the PC. Well, this is true, they don’t offer a low-end product. Apple computers are more expensive but offer a different perspective, it is just like a premium car, you get extra safety, comfort, quality materials, and exclusivity.

In the field of music production, Apple does have a big drawback. You’ll find far fewer free music software and audio plugins for MAC than for PC.

Below you have the Apple’s 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display specs:

You can get LogicPro software already pre-installed on your iMac for $ 199. Also, if you want more memory or more storage space you have to pay extra.

Why PC?

For the PC you can get a huge amount of free VST instruments and other cool freeware plugins and software.

PC computers are more flexible and can keep up with your budget. For example, you can build a PC yourself ordering different components from different manufacturers.

If you need extra space, you can simply add a new hardware disk for that. This can happen if you want to store very large sample libraries such as Symphony Series (44 GB), MAXIMO by Sonokinetic (36,3 GB), CINEMORPHX by Sample Logic (30 GB) and more.

Film scoring music composers make the example, they need huge storage space for their sample libraries.

For those with home studios, I recommend this approach. With a little more generous budget you can get a PC computer that will be perfect for both music production and other media applications or even for video games.

A powerful PC desktop can become the center of your musical production but also can be your center of entertainment. The comfort of your home allows this and you should take advantage.

Here is a setup for music production, audio recording and editing and even for 3D graphics, photo editing or gaming that you can build with less than $1000 (excluding peripherals)!

This configuration will handle any music software (DAW), any audio plugins including virtual instruments, software synthesizers, multiple effects on the main mix or individual tracks, soft samplers, and so much more.

If you need to add a 27-inch monitor, a mouse and a keyboard, gotta fork out about another $ 300 – still below the price of Apple’s iMac.

Conclusions

Both platforms have their own advantages and disadvantages. It may depend on your budget, productivity, your customer base, digital audio workstation (DAW) choice or your own preferences.

For a stable system to use it exclusively for music production and audio recording go with the MAC. MACs just aren’t competing in certain markets such as gaming computers.

If you had to choose for a home studio, where you can carry on other activities besides production, then choose the PC, it’s more flexible and more upgradeable. Microsoft’s new Windows 10 is more stable and secured compared to previous versions, so why not?!

What? My opinion? As I said: buy both! 🙂

Fl Studio For Mac

Do not forget that besides the computer and the music software you’ll need a good audio interface, a pair of quality audio monitors and a MIDI controller, at least for the beginning.

Also see: Essential Music Production Equipment

Despite the Mac's recent gains in market share, Windows is still the dominant operating system, especially in businesses. That means there may be times when you need to run the Microsoft OS: perhaps there’s an application your company uses that’s only available for Windows, or you’re a web developer and you need to test your sites in a true native Windows web browser. Or maybe you want to play computer games that aren’t available for OS X. Whatever your reason for running Windows, there are a number of ways your Mac can do it for you.

If you need to run just one or two specific Windows apps, you may be able to do so using CrossOver (), which can run such applications without requiring you to actually install Windows. (CrossOver's vendor, CodeWeavers, maintains a list of compatible apps.)

If you need a more flexible, full-fledged Windows installation, you still have several other options. You could use Apple’s own Boot Camp, which lets you install Windows on a separate partition of your hard drive. Or you could install one of three third-party virtualization programs: Parallels Desktop 7 (), VMware Fusion (), or VirtualBox (), each of which lets you run Windows (or another operating system) as if it were just another OS X application.

Of those four options, Boot Camp offers the best performance; your Mac is wholly given over to running Windows. But you have to reboot your system to use Boot Camp, so you can’t use it at the same time as OS X; it's Mac or Windows, but not both. And while VirtualBox is free, setting it up is complicated—downright geeky, at times—and it lacks some bells and whistles you might want. Which leaves Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion as your best alternatives.

So, of those two, how do you decide which one is right for you? In the past, I tried to answer that question by comparing virtualization programs head-to-head, to see how they did on specific tasks. This time, however, that task-based approach didn’t work, largely because (with a couple exceptions that are noted below) the latest versions of Fusion and Parallels Desktop are nearly indistinguishable in performance. So instead of picking one program over the other based on how well it performs a given task, the choice now hinges on some more subjective factors. So this time around, I’ll look at those and try to explain how the two programs differ on each.

Note that, for the most part, I've focused primarily on using these programs to run Windows on your Mac. You can, of course, use them to run other operating systems—including OS X Lion itself—but that’s not the focus here.

General Performance

As noted, both Parallels Desktop and Fusion perform well when it comes to running Windows 7 on a Mac. Macworld Labs ran both programs through PCWorld’s WorldBench 6 benchmark suite, and the results were close: overall, VMware Fusion beat out Parallels Desktop by a very slight margin (113 to 118, meaning Fusion was 18 percent faster than a theoretical baseline system, Parallels Desktop 13 percent). Parallels Desktop was faster than Fusion in some individual tests, Fusion was faster in others, and in the rest the differences were almost too close to call.

Parallels Desktop 7 vs. VMware Fusion 4

WorldBench 6 uses automated test scripts and eight different applications to simulate the real-world use of a system; we run the full suite multiple times then average the results together. For WorldBench scores, higher is better. All other results are in seconds; lower is better. Best result in bold. Tests run on a 2011 17-inch 2.2GHz Quad Core i7 MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM running OS X Lion 10.7.1; both Virtual Machines were configured to use a 200GB drive, 1724MB RAM, and 4 processors

Distill these numbers to their essence, and what you have are two fast, capable ways of running Windows on your Mac.

Advantage: Neither (or both).

Specific types of performance

While the two programs are practically indistinguishable in general usage, there are three specific scenarios in which greater differences emerge.

The first of them: gaming. If you want to run Windows in a virtual machine to play games that you can’t play on a Mac, then you’ll want to use Parallels Desktop 7. In my testing, it handily outperformed Fusion, especially on newer titles. One reason is that Parallels supports up to 1GB of video ram (VRAM), versus only 256MB in Fusion. Parallels Desktop also has better DirectX support; one game I tried looked fine in Parallels using DirectX, but awful in Fusion; switching to OpenGL in Fusion solved that problem, but not all games offer this option.

Overall, Parallels Desktop’s 3D engine seems to work much better for games in Windows than does Fusion’s engine. So if Windows gaming is your thing, Parallels is the one you want to use.

Advantage: Parallels Desktop.

Linux with Accelerated Graphics

The second big difference between the two: Only Parallels includes accelerated 3D graphics in Linux virtual machines, so if you need that, you’ll need to use Parallels.

Advantage: Parallels Desktop.

Virtualization Explorer

The third big difference: If you want to explore operating systems other than Windows, Fusion offers a much broader universe of alternatives. Both programs support “virtual appliances”—dowloadable, pre-configured operating systems, often bundled with specific applications. VMware’s appliance library is huge, with over 1,900 appliances available; Parallels Desktop’ library, on the other hand, contains only 98. (Desktop can use VMware’s appliances, but they must first be converted to the Parallels format; it doesn’t really seem fair to give the program full credit for that capabiity, if it’s reliant on the VMware ecosystem.) So you want to explore the wild world of operating systems and applications, Fusion is the way to go.

Advantage: Fusion.

So much for the three categories with relatively clear winners; now for the more subjective criteria.

Purchase and license

Fusion and Parallels Desktop both normally cost $80, but pricing for both is a moving target. For example, VMware is currently offering Fusion at a promotional price of $50. Meanwhile, Parallels will sell Desktop 7 as an upgrade to owners of older versions for $50; if you’re currently using Fusion, Parallels will sell you Desktop 7 for $30. No matter how much you pay for a virtualization program, remember that you’ll also need to factor in the price of Windows itself.

There’s a big hidden cost in those prices: the software license. Fusion’s license (for non-business users) allows you to install and use it on any Macs that you own or control. Parallels Desktop, on the other hand, requires one license per machine, and it uses activation to check those serial numbers. So if you want to run your virtualization program on more than one Mac, Fusion will cost less—potentially much less.

Advantage: Fusion (for the moment).

Installation and general operation

Installing Fusion 4 is surprisingly simple: You just drag and drop the program to any directory you wish. There’s no installer to run, and you can store the program anywhere. When you first launch Fusion, it asks for your administrative password and activates its extensions. But those extensions aren’t hidden away in some low-level system folder where you’ll never find them. Instead, they remain within the Fusion application bundle and automatically activate on subsequent launches.

More importantly, they’re deactivated when you quit Fusion. In fact, when you quit Fusion, unless you choose to leave the Windows applications menu item in your Mac’s menu bar, absolutely nothing Fusion-related is left running. This setup also makes uninstalling a snap—just drag the app to the trash, and you’re done. Taking a program as complex as Fusion, and making it as easy to install and uninstall as any simple utility, is a major accomplishment.

Parallels, by contrast, is installed via an installer, its extensions are installed in the System folder and are always present, even when Desktop isn’t running. In addition, two background processes continue to run after you quit Parallels. These processes don’t take much RAM or CPU power, but they’re there.

Advantage: Fusion.

Preferences and virtual machine settings

Windows Or Mac For College

Both of these programs have lots of settings options; Parallels Desktop has more of them and, consequently, has a more complicated preferences screen. Both of their preferences panels are reasonably well organized, doing a decent job of categorizing the various settings. One thing I don’t like about Parallels is that it automatically enrolls you in the company’s Customer Experience Program, which collects anonymous usage data; you have to opt out by disabling it in the Advanced section of Preferences. Fusion offers a similar program, but you have to opt in, not out.

When it comes to changing the settings for a virtual machine, the two programs take a slightly different approach: Parallels Desktop uses a floating window that’s independent of the virtual machine being configured; that makes it easy to toggle between the settings and the virtual machine, but it’s also easy to lose track of the settings window if you click another window to the foreground.

Fusion, by contrast, dims the virtual machine, and presents a fixed window in the center of the screen, on top of the virtual machine. Its settings window mimics that of System Preferences, while Parallels uses a tabs-and-lists layout. Some users may prefer one over the other, but I find they both work reasonably well.

Advantage: Neither (or both).

Windowed windows

Both programs can be run in an “integration” mode, meaning Windows applications aren't bound inside a single Windows window; rather, they appear side-by-side in the OS X graphical user interface with Mac programs. (VMware calls this mode Unity; Parallels calls it Coherence.)

In this mode, both programs seem to treat these windows as though they're regular Mac apps. But there is a subtle but telling difference: Parallels Desktop actually treats the windows of your Windows apps as one, even though they display separately. You can see this if you activate Mission Control in OS X Lion: Regardless of how many Windows applications you’re running, they’ll all be lumped together in one Parallels Desktop entry. This means, among other things, that if you use a window-management utility, it may not work correctly.

Fusion, on the other hand, treats each Windows app like a window from any OS X application: The system treats them as truly separate from one another. If you open Mission Control while you’re using Fusion, each running Windows app gets its own entry.

If you prefer to think of your virtual machine as a single entity, you’ll probably prefer Parallels Desktop’ Coherence mode. But if you’re going to the trouble of using an integrated mode, chances are you want your Windows apps to behave just like your Mac ones. And in that case it makes more sense to treat the windows the way Fusion does.

Advantage: Fusion.

Updates

Programs of this complexity require frequent updates; there’s just so much going on that there’s always going to be another feature to add or another bug to fix. The two companies handle updates differently, however. Parallels Desktop pushes out updates rapidly, so users get the latest features and fixes as quickly as possible. Fusion has a slower update cycle. Both programs have in-app updating now, so that portion of the routine has gotten simpler than it was in the past.

So which update methodology is better, frequent small updates or occasional larger updates? That's really up to you; some people like knowing that they’ve always got the latest bug fixes and features, while others may prefer longer periods between updates. The important thing, though, is that both companies do actively keep their products up to date.

Advantage: Neither (or both).

And the winner is…

So which virtualization solution should you purchase? In my comparison, Fusion comes out ahead (four wins, two losses, and three ties). But you may prioritize these features differently than I do. That’s why I suggest you download each program’s free trial version and see how each handles your particular needs. Both are excellent performers in the Windows arena, so you won’t be disappointed by either program’s speed. Instead, your selection will come down to your feelings about those other, less measurable factors—and for that, nothing beats hands-on experience.

Senior Contributor Rob Griffiths is master of ceremonies at Many Tricks Software.

[Updated 02/14/12 to clarify the number of apps that can be run under CrossOver.]