Help me order my new APPLE Computer

Any of the current Macs work wonderfully as a music server. The form depends more on your wants and needs.

1. Get as much memory as you can afford.
2. Get as much hard-drive space as you can afford.
3. The new OSX Leopard will be available this Friday.
4. Apple Lossless is great for high quality, yet smaller files. Bit For Bit.
5. WAV and AIFF are "true PCM" files. Bit For Bit.
6. Backup Hard Drive. Unless you enjoying ripping your CDs. Seriously, I see this becoming a new "audiophile" hobby. Think about it, "Personal Remastering"?
7. Turn the iTunes volume all the way up. I would like to really know how good or bad the volume control is?
8. TURN OFF ALL THE "SOUND CRAP" IN PREFERENCES!!!!

I would very highly recommend the HagUSB from HagTech. For $120.00 bucks it turns a Mac into a fine sounding music machine.

Here are some links that you might like.

http://www.hagtech.com/hagusb.html
http://sixmoons.com/audioreviews/musicloverdigital/digital.html

The 47 Labs Shigaraki DAC is very, very nice. ;-)

Above all else, make sure you have fun!

The best value option is the new intel based iMac with the 20" screen and 2.4 GHz and 320 GB drive. It runs very quiet compared to previous iMac's and power macs. If you are serious then you probably nead to hook it up to an external RAID drive and this will be the expensive part.

LaCie drives ( a bit noisy )are good and cheap and run on firewire 800 if you don't have much music then get one of these as backup and avoid the cost of an expensive RAID system. You could use two big LaCie drives as a system with bigger storage but as I said - they are noisy...click click click - it will be nicer if you can live withing the iMac's capabilities and just use the LaCie for backup! Leopard contains new back up software or you can use one of the freeware programs to mirror the drive. Oh, BTW - one important trick...make sure you set the back up drive to private with the control panel "Spotlight" settings - otherwise your Imac will try to crawl and index your backup drive (which is unecessary and noisy if it is for backup).

As you or anyone should be aware - the half life (50% failure rate) of hard drives seems to be around 3 to 5 years (use has a lot to do with it) - so BACK UP is ESSENTIAL. For office files and paperwork stuff....burn a data DVD (or several) every 6 months - then store it in a fire safe or off site.

Some softwares allow you to schedule backups (Leopard should provide this too) - this is best ....simply set up the Imac to wake up once a week at a certain time and have the back up schedules to commence two minutes later....

Leopard will do continual backups (in a very cool way). Whatever flavor Mac you choose, just be sure to get an external drive as suggested. When you plug it in, the computer will ask if you want to use it as a backup. Click 'yes' and you're done.

If you have an Apple store nearby, I'd encourage you to do your shopping tomorrow night when they launch the new OS. They often have discounts at those events.

Also be forewarned that they always announce new models in early January.