I'd like to occasionally use my G4 for musical drafting. I put an SSD into the iMac recently, but haven't updated the RAM from the 1GB it has now. I probably will eventually, but somehow it feels like it's not the culprit, or that it's not the only culprit to the issue.
The issue is that even if I have a new or otherwise very minimal project in GarageBand and no third-party plug-ins installed, when I try to record in some MIDI data, the latency is so great that even if I'd actually played it on the beat, the resulting recorded MIDI clip will have the notes all over the place and out of time. It's practically unusable. I'm aware of the buffer size setting but it doesn't seem to do enough in this case. So back in the day, how did people actually manage do any music stuff on the iMac G4? Surely it was powerful enough for the basic stuff?
My hunch here is that I might need an external Firewire audio interface (the USB ports assumedly being too slow), but is that actually the case, and what does it do in terms of MIDI, actually?
It feels insane to come to think about an audio interface as late as now, because I started dabbling with music when I got my first personal Mac that was a G5, and that iMac nor any of my Macs that followed ever required an external audio interface in order to simply get some audio and MIDI in. On my main computer, I've always just taken MIDI directly from a controller to the computer's USB port and it's been fine.
Sure, the old iMacs I had would struggle to play back complex projects with too many tracks in them but that was a very understandable issue that could be managed with some workarounds. Now it just seems so confusing that this iMac can't even manage a very simple project at its early stages, and the only envelope data is the sustain pedal, if anything.
The issue is that even if I have a new or otherwise very minimal project in GarageBand and no third-party plug-ins installed, when I try to record in some MIDI data, the latency is so great that even if I'd actually played it on the beat, the resulting recorded MIDI clip will have the notes all over the place and out of time. It's practically unusable. I'm aware of the buffer size setting but it doesn't seem to do enough in this case. So back in the day, how did people actually manage do any music stuff on the iMac G4? Surely it was powerful enough for the basic stuff?
My hunch here is that I might need an external Firewire audio interface (the USB ports assumedly being too slow), but is that actually the case, and what does it do in terms of MIDI, actually?
It feels insane to come to think about an audio interface as late as now, because I started dabbling with music when I got my first personal Mac that was a G5, and that iMac nor any of my Macs that followed ever required an external audio interface in order to simply get some audio and MIDI in. On my main computer, I've always just taken MIDI directly from a controller to the computer's USB port and it's been fine.
Sure, the old iMacs I had would struggle to play back complex projects with too many tracks in them but that was a very understandable issue that could be managed with some workarounds. Now it just seems so confusing that this iMac can't even manage a very simple project at its early stages, and the only envelope data is the sustain pedal, if anything.