Music departments in your school

[Sylv3r]

Hi all

 

I am interested to hear what software and hardware you are using in your Music department in your school. We are both a secondary school and sixth form college and we have a mixed bag of Cubase licences (different versions) across the 20 PC's in music. We use Tascams on all machines. We probably need a refresh of the kit over the summer, but I am interested in what you guys have in place. Are you using:

 

Windows / Mac's

Cubase / ProTools / Sibelius

Any additional hardware such as Tascams etc.

 

I've priced up to replace the suite and we are looking at around £12k with some fairly hefty refurbished PC's.

 

Thanks

[3s-gtech]

46 Macs over three suites (a mix of older and recent models, all with 4GB+ RAM, SSDs and on El Capitan)

15 Pro Tools licenses

16 Sibelius licenses

Logic Pro site license

Garageband on all

Midi keyboards for each

31 USB sound cards

[dhicks]

Windows / Mac's

 

Macs and Chromebooks.

 

Cubase / ProTools / Sibelius

 

Garageband on the Macs, Soundtrap and Flat.io on ChromeOS (or any browser, at school or home).

 

Any additional hardware such as Tascams etc.

 

USB / MIDI keyboards.

 

I've priced up to replace the suite and we are looking at around £12k with some fairly hefty refurbished PC's.

 

Chromebooks with USB keyboards might not cover absolutely every musical requirement you might have, but they might make a very useful addition / supplement and allow you to stretch your money out a bit more. £400 for a Chromebook (a snazzy new one, cheaper are available, or use existing / refurbished machines with CloudReady), £50 for a keyboard, £65 per year for 50 Flat.io accounts, £400 per year for 50 Soundtrap / WeVideo / Explain Everything licenses.

 

A new touchscreen Chromebook with a USB/MIDI keyboard is rather less bulky than some older music technology solutions - smaller USB keyboards can be powered by the Chromebook itself, so all of a sudden you have a portable solution that just requires one USB cable to be plugged in to work.

Edited May 12, 2017 by dhicks

[CamelMan]

We're down sizing our Music department due to lack of up take (some old macs running Logic) but my plan was to replace with PC, with Sibelius / Reaper etc. due to costs and network integration.

@ICTDirect_Dave did a piece a thread a while ago on here which spec'ed up a good refurb solution for it - you might want to have a chat.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

I did a blog about this some time ago (still my only Edugeek Blog). Whilst the machines I've suggested may be a little dated, the sentiment remains the same.

 

My suggestion for a kickass music PC these days would be a HP Z420 with 8 cores, 24GB RAM, SSD & HDD and some USB 2/3 audio interface. You're looking £430 plus the interface.

 

Edit: Oh and I would ALWAYS suggest using Ableton Live - it's a magnificent piece of software

Edited May 12, 2017 by ICTDirect_Dave