Product Reviews

One much vaunted benefit of Mac cloning was that you'd be able to buy a system exclusive to your needs . It's an ideal that Computer Warehouse has taken to heart. Sporting a red chassis, Nashville is aimed at the hi-tech music market. Bundled with Steinberg's popular Cubase VST (Virtual Studio Technology) audio/MIDI software and Korg's 1212I/O audio interface hardware, this mini-tower 200MHz PowerPC 604e-based Mac is both versatile and fast. This is due in part to the 256K Level 2 cache which is essential to run Cubase VST 3.5 - a demanding application which takes full advantage of the machine's 64Mb of EDO RAM.

Based on the Tanzania motherboard, Nashville has a 16x speed IDE CD-ROM drive and a 2.1Gb IDE hard drive, plus five full-length PCI slots. One slot is occupied by the Korg 1212I/O card.

Accommodating the storage demands of digital audio recording, two additional SCSI units are fitted: a 3.2Gb Quantum Fireball TM and a Sony CDU 926S CD-R drive. In practice, the smaller 2.1Gb IDE drive is used for system software and applications while the 3.2Gb SCSI unit stores all the audio and multimedia material. The CD-R speaks for itself. It's accompanied by Adaptec's Toast 3.5 and Toast Audio Extractor, both used for mastering audio and data CDs. Incidentally, Nashville is advertised with CD-R only, but actually comes with a separate CD-ROM.

A few of the application aliases which are provided on the desktop for easy access didn't work as they referred to the manufacturer's master disk used for pre-installation. This is a tiny grumble, though, as the set-up of Cubase

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VST with the Korg 1212I/O card was faultless and intelligently arranged for both audio and MIDI. The 1212I/O card typically samples audio at 48KHz, the default rate for the ADAT digital tape recorders with which it can interface (see sidebar). CD audio, however, runs at 44.1KHz, and Nashville has been set to operate at this rate. If you're not careful, it's easy to master CDs at 48KHz - you'd be unable to play them, or, worse still, they would play 10% more slowly on a hi-fi.

Cubase VST provides the means to add effects and mixdown multi-track audio. It's capable of 32-track audio playback, and Nashville will run 16 audio tracks comfortably, although more may be possible, depending on your use of effects and EQ. VST also has a fine MIDI sequencer, but this creates its own problems when mastering audio/MIDI arrangements to CD-R. The program can create a stereo-mixed audio track for CD mastering from the existing audio tracks with effects treatments, but the MIDI instruments will be left out. MIDI sounds need to be recorded as audio tracks, so they can be part of this mixdown process. It's not the most spontaneous way to work, but it is effective and keeps all the live audio recordings in the digital domain through-out. Just don't run out of audio tracks before you need to record the MIDI.

Nashville ships with mTropolis 1.1.2 multimedia authoring software, but its use may be hampered by the absence of a video input. The bundled copy of ClarisWorks 4 could prove handy for CD covers and lyric sheets, though. The choice of audio/MIDI software may not delight everyone, which is why another Nashville, equipped with Emagic's Logic Discovery and Audiowerk 8 card, is expected soon.

Individually, the extras that make Nashville different from its sibling, New York, may well balance out so that there's only a £100 saving. That is until you add mTropolis, which retails at £895, into the bundle. Add that, plus the warranty, and Nashville looks like a bargain. Overall, it offers a fuss-free solution to anyone keen to make music but nervous about installing cards, memory or even hard disks. With Nashville, the 'plug-and-play' promise at last comes true.