After 10 or so years of using Cakewalk products exclusively I have made the switch to Pro Tools. This decision was partly made for me though as my homemade recording computer suffered a motherboard failure. Being a Mac fan, I did not want to build or buy another PC. The only reason I kept a PC around was because I had so much money tied up in Sonar, and VST plugins. You are probably wondering why I just didn’t keep Sonar and run XP through boot camp on the Mac right? Well my main interface was a MOTU 2408 which uses a PCIe card installed in the computer. In order to continue using the MOTU interface I would have had to purchase a Mac Pro, which is way out of my price range.
So after doing some research, I found that all of the plugins I have purchases offered RTAS versions that would allow me to use them in Pro Tools without an extra VST wrapper (although at $99, the FXpansion VST wrapper is still a good investment, as there are many free VST plugins around worth checking out). So off to the Apple store to pick out a new computer! I ended up getting a 20″ iMac with an upgraded hard drive, wireless keyboard/mouse and 1 gig of ram (I will upgrade ram later). Now I needed a new interface. I have always been a fan of MOTU recording interfaces, and considered getting another 828, but that still would have left me without a sequencer. Enter Pro Tools. Digidesign has always been a hardware company; they make interfaces that cost anywhere from 300 to 10s of thousands of dollars. All of these interfaces come with a version of Pro Tools. In the end I picked a Factory 003 Rack system. The factory system comes with a plugin package that was enough to get me going, and connects to the iMac with a supplied firewire cable.
Setting up the interface and iMac was simple (there is nothing too the iMac!). Installation of Pro Tools LE 7 was straightforward but authorizing the included plugins was not. I have never used an iLock USB dongle before, and found the documentation was lacking, but after I figured it out, it is actually quite easy to use. Luckily for me the 003 comes with a Pro Tools DVD that is geared towards Pro Tools beginners. There are many cool things that Pro Tools offers, that Sonar does not, but I don’t have time to go into them now (I will save that for another post).
Digidesign does not recommend recording straight to the iMacs main hard drive. Instead they recommend using an external firewire hard drive (approved by digidesign of course). I decided to use a Glyph GT050 250 gig drive (which comes pre formatted for use with Macs).
My first impression of the 003 Rack was good; the converters sound to me much better than the MOTUs. I do however miss MOTU’s cuemix functionality. The 003 Rack cannot be run in a stand-alone mode like the MOTU. This is probably my biggest complaint with the 003 because I used to use cuemix to allow me to jam on my V-Drums along with songs on iTunes. Without a hardware mixer in my setup, this is almost impossible to accomplish. But this gives me an excuse to pick up a digital mixer now!
