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Mac vs PC

A

am-fm

Guest
One of the colleges I'm looking at is Mac based for audio and video editing. Also, they recomend Communication majors get a Mac laptop. However, I allready have a laptop with Adobe Audition & Premire Pro on it, so I really dont see the need to get a new laptop when the existing one does the job.

When I asked the reasoning behind this, the reply was that the majority of editing is done on Mac-based machines. Is this true, for radio at least? Most of the people I've asked use Windows PC's. <P ID="signature">______________

AOL IM: wnjoldies or jamminoldies105
CBS-FM lives at http://67.83.118.54:8010
Oldies Board co-moderator</P>
 
> One of the colleges I'm looking at is Mac based for audio
> and video editing. Also, they recomend Communication majors
> get a Mac laptop. However, I allready have a laptop with
> Adobe Audition & Premire Pro on it, so I really dont see the
> need to get a new laptop when the existing one does the job.
>
>
> When I asked the reasoning behind this, the reply was that
> the majority of editing is done on Mac-based machines. Is
> this true, for radio at least? Most of the people I've asked
> use Windows PC's.
>

Most stations use Intel PCS for the automation systems, data processing, and audio production. Mainly because they are cheap and replacement parts can be had from a large number of suppliers and cheaply, too.

The stanard set up at most Clear Channel stations is a Windows XP workstation running Prophet for automation intake and playback and Audition for production.

There are number of radio shops and studios that do use ProTools or some other mac-based multitrack system. All of us cheap folks use a frankenstein Intel and Audition....
 
> One of the colleges I'm looking at is Mac based for audio
> and video editing. Also, they recomend Communication majors
> get a Mac laptop. However, I allready have a laptop with
> Adobe Audition & Premire Pro on it, so I really dont see the
> need to get a new laptop when the existing one does the job.
>
>
> When I asked the reasoning behind this, the reply was that
> the majority of editing is done on Mac-based machines. Is
> this true, for radio at least? Most of the people I've asked
> use Windows PC's.
>

The broadcast industry is very PC based unless they are very forward
thinking. However, on the content creation side, the Mac is the best
choice and does hold about a 50% market share with that group.

I've been using both platforms for about 20 years. IMHO Apple is clearly the
choice for digital audio, digital video, and graphics for many reasons,
but clearly the Mac OS is more mature and elegant, whereas everything in the
windows environment is clunky and convoluted. The PC environment forces you to think like it works, whereas the Mac lets you work like you think. The PC environment has been playing catch up in rich media applications, and if you are used to applications that only run on them, you are kinda stuck. Their market share incursion into education is a result of Gates just giving schools billions of dollars of equipment for free just to reduce the domination Apple had in the schools.

You won't find many Macs running automation or traffic software, but in the
world of Pro Tools you find Macs ... Final Cut Pro pretty much blows the doors off of most of it's competitors unless you have VERY deep pockets to buy really high end stuff.

Some people just love PC's but in most cases these people have never given the Mac platform a serious look, that is to say their opinion is based more on heresay than experience.

So you have to ask yourself, is this about maintaining your status quo or moving forward?

Good luck.

<P ID="signature">______________
Electricity is really just organized lightning.
~George Carlin</P>
 
Pros and Cons
I am a concert audio Engineer and a broadcast Engineer.
I also own a world Class recording studio(W/Neve console)
Over the Years I found I needed Both windows based and MAC.
On the road and Touring almost Everyone in the Music business
is running a Mac. We use a Program called SMAART to analyze Rooms.
Its windows Based. some guys run it in Virtual PC on Macs. I never had luck with that. so I needed a windows based machine to Run the 1 Program.Everything Else is Run On the Mac. My Console automation and setup Configurations are all On the Mac.If I want to record the shows I use Pro Tools and multitrack off the console direct outs into a rack of MOTU's and firewire into the Mac laptop
Its great for that.
Now in Radio. except for the Pro Tools on the Mac I never use it.
I use adobe audition in the Production rooms. All the stations I ever worked in
and currently work In are all Windows Based.Windows 98,2000 Pro and XP Pro
with Linus/Unix Servers. Each has Its own Nitch.
TV Editing and Music and Publishing industrys its MAC Based.. Radio and Stock Markets windows and Unix Based. BTW the Stock markets and Banking for Years Ran OS/2. which I still feel was the Best multitasking OS out there...
Microsoft screwed Over IBM on that Deal.
If a system did go down. when It rebooted It came back up where it left off
hardly any loss of data. I rememeber when I ran a 64 node BBS back in the Days of PCBoard BBSing.. It took a Network Of 16 PC/s to run 64 nodes, 4 nodes per machine Running DOS and Deskview with Novell or Lantastic. For networking.
at the time the 486 DX-50 and DXII 66 were the big machines.
then they Ported PCBoard for OS/2.... I ran all 64 Nodes on 2 machines
a 486 dx50 with no hickups.. the limitation was you could only run 32 com ports per machine. But when I finally bought a 64 port Terminal server I ran the Entire BBS 64 Nodes on 1 machine under OS/2 YEP OS/2 Ruled.....
then came the Internet explosion and BBSing went the way Of the dinosaurs.
amd Bill Gates screwed over IBM and came out with that NT crap. based on OS/2( microsoft wrote OS/2 for IBM)

Back On subject. If your staying with Radio.. stay with a Windows based PC.
If you Tour like I do. stay with Mac. OR HAVE BOTH.
last thought. when out Doing Station Proofs( field readings) I use Streetmaps and topo software with a USB GPS. It will not Run On a Mac.. so I needed a Windows Based Laptop Just For Doing that work... I wish Delorme the largest Mapping software company would again make a Mac version Of their software. But I guess Not Enough Mac Sales so they discontinued it.

>
> Most stations use Intel PCS for the automation systems, data
> processing, and audio production. Mainly because they are
> cheap and replacement parts can be had from a large number
> of suppliers and cheaply, too.
>
> The stanard set up at most Clear Channel stations is a
> Windows XP workstation running Prophet for automation intake
> and playback and Audition for production.
>
> There are number of radio shops and studios that do use
> ProTools or some other mac-based multitrack system. All of
> us cheap folks use a frankenstein Intel and Audition....
>
 
> So you have to ask yourself, is this about maintaining your
> status quo or moving forward?

Usualy its not what is the best, but what is good enough and cheap enough. Macs are very expensive when you compare it to an Intel-bases system that you can cobble together with whitebox parts.

> Good luck.
>
 
> Usualy its not what is the best, but what is good enough and
> cheap enough. Macs are very expensive when you compare it to
> an Intel-bases system that you can cobble together with
> whitebox parts.

Don't get me wrong, I've been building my own PCs since I was 12, but a "cobbled-together" PC won't give you Apple's warranty and service (one of the best in the business), and many of the low-cost parts you find at computer shows (motherboards, video & sound cards, DVD-R drives, etc.) are of extremely poor quality and come from no-name Asian manufacturers which have no customer support to speak of. Even name-brand PCs often aren't as reliable as Apple's computers.
<P ID="signature">______________
noiboc.jpg

"This is the New York Emergency Broadcast System satellite channel. They took the crosstown bus."</P>
 
> One of the colleges I'm looking at is Mac based for audio
> and video editing.

Question you might first ask yourself:

Does this college focus primarily on audio or video editing?
I'd bet their primary target is video 'cause that's where
the higher paying jobs are. As you've probably already
read in posts below, in radio Windows predominates; in
television it's Mac. Probably has something to do with
masochism. People attracted to low-paying radio jobs also
tend toward loving the quirks of Windows. Especially XP.

> Also, they recomend Communication majors
> get a Mac laptop. However, I allready have a laptop with
> Adobe Audition & Premire Pro on it, so I really dont see the
> need to get a new laptop when the existing one does the job.

Doesn't matter to the college what you already have. It should
matter to you what programs/computers they use in class. If
they're instructing on Macs and Mac programming you might
survive. But you'll waste a lot of time trying to figure out
what the equivalent moves are on your PC. And, then, if you
have to hand in "papers" or "projects" as files, how are you
gonna convert them to their preferred format without degradation?
Without having to spend an extra day or two per project?

> When I asked the reasoning behind this, the reply was that
> the majority of editing is done on Mac-based machines. Is
> this true, for radio at least? Most of the people I've asked
> use Windows PC's.

Most audio editing, particularly for radio, IS done on PCs.
But for video, it's Mac. Really smart folks who do audio
editing on a PC (and I do myself because that's the platform
the best audio editing programs are written for) NEVER allow
their PC to be connected to The Internet in any manner. Only
in that way can you feel secure from viruses and other evils.

The station I regularly work with (volunteer engineering) has
gone over to all Mac for external communications and all news
applications. They use XP machines only where absolutely
necessary (Prophet Automation, Adobe Audition, fund-raising
software) and keep those machines isolated from the world
outside though some of them are networked together. Time
that used to be spent on removing viruses, spyware, crashes,
etc. is now available for more creative work. In fact, there
was a plan to hire one more person but since all the PC
problems have been just about eliminated it works out that
the hire is not needed and people are finding themselves able
to do their jobs better without hours of extra work.

But check this out:

There has been repeated discussion among Mac users that their will be
a new type Mac, possibly by summer, based on an Intel chip set. A
machine that can run either Windows XP OR a Mac operating system.
Some say it'll be "Tiger" (the latest OS-X) and others say it'll
be something beyond "Tiger".

If you're not going to school before next September or so, consider
spending some time on the web checking out that allegation. You
might find it highly desireable to buy a new computer at that time.<P ID="signature">______________
Misanthropy:

Not just a hobby...a WAY OF LIFE!</P>
 
> There has been repeated discussion among Mac users that
> their will be
> a new type Mac, possibly by summer, based on an Intel chip
> set. A
> machine that can run either Windows XP OR a Mac operating
> system.
> Some say it'll be "Tiger" (the latest OS-X) and others say
> it'll
> be something beyond "Tiger".

All Macs are going to Intel chips. Apple has been covertly running OS X, in every version (10.0,10.1,10.2,10.3,10.4) on Intel Chips all along OS X's development. There's plenty of press on this, so there is no need to repeat any of it.

As far as loading the Mac OS X on a PC, Apple and Intel both have said there will be no way the Mac OS will run on anything other than the specific CPU/chip sets that Apple uses in its machines. As far as loading windows on your Intel based Mac, that will probably be hacked early on, but speaking from experience, the best and sometimes only way to screw up a Mac is to force feed it stuff it doesn't want.<P ID="signature">______________
Electricity is really just organized lightning.
~George Carlin</P>
 
>
> Back On subject. If your staying with Radio.. stay with a
> Windows based PC.
>

You will not find a full featured broadcast automation software for a Mac. The closest thing would be a Moble DJ software called Megaseg and its not really geared towards Radio Broadcasting. Mac lacks in that area so a PC is your best bet for broadcast automation (even if windows has its moments)

Mac's are popular with high end audio production folks though and TV as people have said here, and I notice a lot of bands carry a Apple Powerbook with them and not a PC. It just all depends.

<P ID="signature">______________
Program Director/Music Director
X Music Online
The X
Today's Best Music
http://www.xmusiconline.com/</P>
 
> Pros and Cons
> I am a concert audio Engineer and a broadcast Engineer.
> I also own a world Class recording studio(W/Neve console)
> Over the Years I found I needed Both windows based and
> MAC.
> On the road and Touring almost Everyone in the Music
> business
> is running a Mac. We use a Program called SMAART to analyze
> Rooms.
> Its windows Based. some guys run it in Virtual PC on Macs. I
> never had luck with that. so I needed a windows based
> machine to Run the 1 Program.Everything Else is Run On the
> Mac.

Just a note in defense of Virtual PC. I use version 6 (with Windows 2000) on my Mac G4 and it's been running smoothly for the last year and a half, including printing and internet access. Earlier versions were problematic. But the majority of my work (video post and audio sweetening) is done on Mac.

A friend of mine who worked at KFWB in L.A. says that it is a dual platform shop. Mac and ProTools on the production side, Windows XP on the automation side.

I have heard of several LPFM's using Mac for everything. The program of choice for automation is MegaSeg on OSX (3.9). As for Macs being expensive; you can get a new Mac Mini for 499.00 anywhere or a slightly older G4 for next to nothing on eBay.

db
 
What you read here is absolutely true. Not just this thread, but all of them. Radio seems to be all PC based, where Video and music production seems to be MAC based.

The Audio editing programs you find most prevalently are Adobe Audition (formerly Cool Edit Pro) and Sound Forge among others. Then there is a multitude of Studio and automation software out there like Prophet and Enco, and less expensive ones like OTS, Raduga, and even some cases that use Winamp.

There are Video Editing software systems for PC. Popular ones include Adobe Premiere w/ After Effects. Avid which had been the forefront of non-linear editing still offers PC based video editing software.

An interesting note about programs like Enco is that until the windows 2000 kernel was developed automation software like Enco was largely DOS based as Win 95/98 was not stable enough to count on it running 24-7-365. Win 2k finally was stable enough, and I do think that Win XP is even more stable.

The MAC world is the place to be for content creation. For video editing You Can't Beat MAC's Final Cut Pro. Holy Cow! If you have been using a PC for video editing, you won't believe the possibilities with FCP! It is also very easy to incorporate elements from Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator into Final Cut Pro. There are also companion programs like Live Text and Garage Band that work very nicely with Final Cut.

I must admit that I was never impressed with Macs back in the system 8 & 9 days. It seemed like they were trying to do too much with an outdated architexture. My first experience with system 10 was Love at First Sight! Apple Really did a good job making the Apple OS even more simple. It also made it a lot easier for those of us that grew up on PCs to work in the MAC environment.

Another thing that seems interesting is that after MAC released System 10, Microsoft released Windows XP which has a few MAC-like features. It would almost appear that the two systems are becoming more alike.

Many of the people who have responded here said that they have both machines to do different tasks. This is true. Certain things will work better on the different systems. Also there is certain software that is only available for MAC like Pro-Tools and Final Cut Pro (although I have heard that Apple is working on a version of FCP for Windows) and a lot more that is only made for Windows. You will find a good deal of software that is available for both Operating systems, like Microsoft Office Suite and the Adobe Creative Suite.

The biggest problem (and I speak from experience here) is when you have to move/use media cross platform. Just because you write an AVI file on a mac doesn't mean it is going to play on a PC. Windows Media don't play on MACs. Don't let the fact that there is a MAC version of Windows Media Player available for MACs fool you. It just isn't pretty. Apple stuff seems to work better on PC's, for example iTunes has been very successful at working nicely on PCs. Quicktime for the most part runs on PCs, but can be buggy so be careful.

There used to be a neat wonderful program called Media Cleaner that made it nice and easy to produce media on one system and then transcode it to a format that was compatible with the other. I am not aware of any updates though for several years, and swith advances in codecs on both platofrms it is once again becoming quite challenging to move media from one platform to another.

One last interesting note is that i heard via the grapevine that apple is planning on releasing within the forseeable fututre a version of inal Cut Pro that will run on Windows PCs. This would be bad news for Avid, who used to produce their software for PC and MAC, but discontinued the MAC version because it couldn't compete or hold a candle to Final Cut Pro. Avid used to make Turn-Key non linear editing systems before programs like Adobe Audition and Final Cut Pro (earlier editions) became popular, and fairly normal PC/MACs could handle the vast amounts of Data involved in Video Production.

When all is said and done though, I have to say that for basic audio production I still like Sound Forge. Maybe Adobe Audition is better,(especially with multiple tracks!) but SF is what I grew up with and am used to. Also I think that you see a lot of Radio software in the PC realm because Radio production and Automation and Long Distance Voice Tracking all rely significantly on networking. It seems evident that there are more people familiar with PCs and windows networking then there are MAC "Specialists" and MAC/AppleTalk Network knowledgable people.

We may be on to something here. MACs are ultra stable. If someone were to develope a suite of Radio production, automation, and media management software for the MAC platofrm and also be proficient in MAC networking, they could probably make a lot of money.

One last unrelated thought. I went to a college with a School of Communication. They had an AVF program, meaning that you could major in Audio Production/Broadcast, Video Production/Broadcast, or Film Production. The Audio department was decent. The Video Department was Top Notch. The school also has a Top Notch Radio Station. Once i was already in the program i decided that I wanted to double major in Audio an Video. I couldn't do that. The reason being was that I already was an AVF Major, I couldn't double major in AVF and AVF. Even though my concentration was in Audio. All I cloud do was take as many video courses as I could as electives. I also took a music production course as an elective, just to get exposure to Pro-Tools and Midi. By my 2nd year in the program, I said, "If I only knew then what I know now..." I would have majored in Video, and gotten my audio experience with the School Radio station. It was hard trying to get a spot in the video classes because the spots in the class were held in priority for the Video students. There were student productions that i did get involved in, but it was a lot easier to get involved with the radio station as it is a 24-7 operation, as opposed to a sporatic TV schedule.

I don't know where you are planning to go to school, but I would reccomend getting the Laptop/Computer that they are specifying. It will likely make your life a lot easier in the long run. When you look at how much you are already spending on Tuition and Books, and all the college fees. Plus possibly housing and meals or commuting costs, what is another 15 hundred to 2 Grand?

This is just two cents from someone who has been there, done that, gotten the T-Shirt, currently in the trenches, working on his Masters degree so he can go and do what he was originally going to do (Science Teacher) before getting bitten by the Radio Bug. However I don't regret a minute of it. Its been a whale of an experience.

Good Luck! Hold on Tight, because its going to be one Heck of a Ride!

Best Regards, -Russty!
 
The real bottom line is that this is a political issue.

Apple bought the loyalty of the university community a long time ago. Therefore, nothing else exists in their narrow little universe.

As has been pointed out there are excellent programs for both platforms, although MACs are more often used for video production, while radio uses Wintel machines.

Then again, there's more money in TV to afford the more expensive Apple machines. For radio, there's much more bang for buck in Wintel machines, and high-school trained folks have grown up working with them. At my station, both the office manager and the production guy are 20. She whips out all kinds of great presentations from her Word office suite, and rejected a windows upgrade to keep a DOS based traffic system. He does all kine of creative editing on our Sound Forge, and does various neat tricks with the Simian automation.

Buy the Apple notebook. Smile a lot, believe only about 25% of what these closet socialists tell you & pick up part-time jobs in the real world to gain expereience on real-world equipment. You'll be fine.

A message from the Socialist Republic of Athens (Home of Ohio University)
 
> The real bottom line is that this is a political issue.
>
> Apple bought the loyalty of the university community a long
> time ago. Therefore, nothing else exists in their narrow
> little universe.

Interestingly, at my law school, we use a program to take exams on our laptops that doesn't support Macs. Seeing that those who can type out their answers to the issue-spotting/essay questions have an advantage (typing v. handwriting), I know of at least one Mac laptop owner who purchased a Windows laptop only for the purpose of taking exams.

Recently the Cobb County, Ga., school district (pop. 400,000) proposed leasing Mac laptops for all teachers and students out of the proceeds from a special-purpose sales tax. Apple had a sweet deal, of course. Just when it looked like the school district was going to railroad the deal through, someone sued them and won an injunction. While the media was playing up the benefits of the deal, people were concerned about (1) why the voters were not being asked to approve this enormous deal [it was not specifically included in the verbiage of the sales tax proposal], and (2) no vendors besides Apple were considered.

Subsequent to the injunction, there is now an investigation of potential wrongdoing on the part of the school district, and the superintendent has resigned.
 
> Recently the Cobb County, Ga., school district (pop.
> 400,000) proposed leasing Mac laptops for all teachers and
> students out of the proceeds from a special-purpose sales
> tax.

I would imagine the lawsuit originated with, or is at least
strongly supported, by whatever union to which the people
who maintain the system subscribe. Think of using Windows
as job security for those folks!
<P ID="signature">______________
Misanthropy:

Not just a hobby...a WAY OF LIFE!</P>
 
sounds like sour grapes

>there's much more bang
> for buck in Wintel machines,

Sorry guy to pop your rant filled balloon, but this is just not true!!!

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/4895

and there are plenty more articles like this to discredit your theory.

Some of us "closet socialists" have been computer jockeys a long time. From before Microsoft existed. The first traffic computer I worked on in radio was an old IBM card reading gollumpus as big as your car. Ma and Pa radio couldn't really afford it, but it sure saved time. Aha! Saved time... Since I first encountered computing in '69 we've come a long way, and I'm always open to better solutions. But your attitude is pretty closed. Just because you learned how to drive on your Dad's Oldsmobile, does that mean that's the only kind of car you'd ever want to experience?

What you fail to acknowledge is the cost of operating a Wintel machine with it's susceptability to many problems Macs are just plain immune to this.

Not to mention that some of the most popular windows programs were originally developed (some by Microsoft) for the Mac.

Not to remention the fact that it isn't politics to say independent organizations have voted Apple's customer service/tech support the best in almost every category.

The consolidation of ownership in broadcasting has really thinned the amount of people making purchasing decisions. If anything is political, THAT is. And that is having more effect on what you see in radio and TV studios. Truth is, the growth of computers in rich media creation/editing has spawned many new industries. Audio and Video are no longer the sole domain of radio and TV and the recording industry. Those industries are shrinking in terms of jobs, in fact. And if you're out there on your own, and you have a choice between doing your A/V work on a Mac or PC, there is only one smart choice.

The growth of PC's in broadcasting started more in the office and traffic rooms than it did in the studio. At that time, some of your dated rhetoric held some water, but it doesn't anymore.<P ID="signature">______________
Electricity is really just organized lightning.
~George Carlin</P>
 
Forget both.... AMIGA forever!

> And if you're out there on your own, and you have a choice
> between doing your A/V work on a Mac or PC, there is only
> one smart choice.

Yes... that choice would be Amiga!

When Commodore introduced the Amiga in 1985, it was a decade ahead of PCs and five years ahead of Macs in terms of its audio/video capabilities and operating system. In fact, it was the first true "multimedia" computer, years before that word was even invented. And with a product called "Video Toaster", it formed a powerful video production system which Macs and PCs couldn't catch up to until the late 1990s. Even though Commodore went out of business in 1994, there are still many Amigas in use at TV stations and video production studios all around the world. (In fact, its 8-bit predecessor, the Commodore 64, is still widely used as well!)

Here is a video production studio using Video Toaster on an Amiga 2000 computer (which has roughly the same processing power as an Intel 286). The Amiga is at the bottom of the equipment rack to the right of the keyboard.

Video_toaster.jpg


Here's another Video Toaster production studio, using the Amiga 2000 (on the right) and an even older Amiga 1000 (in front of it):

MC_late80s.jpg


Here's how the Video Toaster interface looked on the Amiga:

Editor_Switcher.jpg


And here's how it looks today in Windows XP... same basic idea!

Live02a.jpg

<P ID="signature">______________
noiboc.jpg

"This is the New York Emergency Broadcast System satellite channel. They took the crosstown bus."</P>
 
Re: Forget both.... AMIGA forever!

> And with a product called "Video
> Toaster", it formed a powerful video production system which
> Macs and PCs couldn't catch up to until the late 1990s.

We just bought a Video Toaster, complete with the Amiga, for out TV moring show. <P ID="signature">______________

AOL IM: wnjoldies or jamminoldies105
CBS-FM lives at http://67.83.118.54:8010
Oldies Board co-moderator</P>
 
> When I asked the reasoning behind this, the reply was that
> the majority of editing is done on Mac-based machines. Is
> this true, for radio at least? Most of the people I've asked
> use Windows PC's.

If they're running Macs they're probably running Pro Tools.

It's only as of late that the PC version of Pro Tools has been as robust as the Mac.

As for what's in commercial stations, if it's an older Pro Tools shop, it's probably Mac; if it's a newer Pro Tools shop, it's probably PC. I've seen both, but I see more PC's because they're cheaper (and I don't have to tell you how radio stations spend money).

But this is probably more a combination of "we've always done it this way" and Apple giving them price breaks back in the day that's kept the administration loyal. Now that PC's have gotten closer to the Mac for multimedia, you're going to have to ask the faculty to learn something new, and you can guess how that would be recieved. :)

There's worse things to learn on than a Mac, and being proficient on both platforms is a plus. Find out what kind of a deal the school can make on a PowerBook.<P ID="signature">______________
...co-moderator of the Satellite Radio, Phoenix, and San Diego boards...</P>
 
Re: Forget both.... AMIGA forever!

> We just bought a Video Toaster, complete with the Amiga, for
> out TV moring show.

Have fun! FYI, the graphics on the pilot and first season of "Babylon 5" were all done by a network of 24 Amiga 2000 computers running Video Toaster.

And although not in the hands of Commodore anymore, the Amiga platform is still alive today, with a new operating system that is amazingly similar to Mac OS X:

<a target="_blank" href=http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/amiga.ars>http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/amiga.ars</a>

There's even a version of WinAmp for the Amiga!

i6cbd0.png

<P ID="signature">______________
noiboc.jpg

"This is the New York Emergency Broadcast System satellite channel. They took the crosstown bus."</P>
 
> > Usualy its not what is the best, but what is good enough
> and
> > cheap enough. Macs are very expensive when you compare it
> to
> > an Intel-bases system that you can cobble together with
> > whitebox parts.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I've been building my own PCs since I
> was 12, but a "cobbled-together" PC won't give you Apple's
> warranty and service (one of the best in the business), and
> many of the low-cost parts you find at computer shows
> (motherboards, video & sound cards, DVD-R drives, etc.) are
> of extremely poor quality and come from no-name Asian
> manufacturers which have no customer support to speak of.
> Even name-brand PCs often aren't as reliable as Apple's
> computers.
>

The brand name PCs are also built with the same "no name" components. Never had a white-box machine fail on me. In the rare instance I have ha dsomething fail -- and its usually the power supply -- the parrts are inexpensive.

With a Mac, you are paying a large permium (3x to 4x) for a technically superior machine that has almost no broadcast software available for it. For specilized markets, the MAC may be great. But for broadcast use, forget it.
 
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