I installed a trial version of Logic Express (casually termed as ‘Logic’ from here on) that I downloaded many months to a couple of years ago when I was just about to purchase a Mac (instead of my Dual Core Acer Laptop that I own), and looking retrospectively I think I may have made a mistake.
My experience making music so far has been with Cakewalk SONAR (v5) and Project 5 (v2.5). I’ve always had driver and latency issues (even when I was running it on XP). My main box is a Quad-core Q6600 system with 4 gigs of RAM. I use a Roland UA-4fx for my audio input and output, have all the latest drivers and still I had either Audio Engine crashes or terrible latency.
I plug the same hardware into this G4 Mac, install the drivers and the latency in Logic is non-existent. I’m pretty disappointed. There’s quite a bit of getting used to the details and quite a few hotkeys that I miss (the W key was one of my favs in Sonar & P5), but all in all it’s still set up quite sanely–and sounds fantastic even with a basic, non-optimized mix. My tests so far have been quite successful. I’m not sure if it’s successful enough for me to purchase a new Mac in the next few months though. It IS enough however for me to look into purchasing a copy of Logic 7 (as Logic 8 is out of specs for this machine).