Hey guys, I have a ibook G3 I built for my daughter who is 3. She turns 4 soon and I want her to learn music as she loves it heaps. I found this site when setting up the mac for her and I think it will be quite easy and cheap to set-up a keyboard with the mac for playing around with sounds etc. Maybe even making some songs.
Now the ibook is a 12" G3 over clocked to 700mhz with the maximum 640mb of ram. It currently dual boots os 9.2.2 and osx tiger. We almost never use the tiger as all her games work on os9 perfectly and it is much faster. I have a 120gb firewire HDD for it but it does not boot from that drive for some reason. It should be easy enough to wipe the thing for a 10th time and setup a dual boot. I guess I could also put the 120gb HDD inside the mac but I would rather not, its been taken apart far too many times already.
I found
this Evolution (M-Audio) MK-361 USB Keyboard keyboard today and put a bid on it after finding the list here of keyboards that work. This looks perfectly fine for our needs and its brand new in the box for less than $180.
Now I'm looking for a getting started type of thing as I have never used any of this kind of stuff before. I see in the instant DAW package that it installs a soundcard driver extension. What kind of (USB?) sound card do we need for the ibook to use instant DAW or is the inbuilt one ok? We won't be recording line in I don't think, just using the keyboard to play music and making sounds with synths and layering etc.
I have been looking around here and reading a lot but you don't seem to have any beginners information. This has been my first mac computer and I had it running on car batteries in series for ages until I could even get a power cord out of the USA. I am trying to find a G4 locally but not having much luck, something with a bigger screen would obviously be much better than the 12" iBook for this kind of work, but the G3 should be a good starting point if anyone can point me in the right direction. Your help is greatly appreciated.