An 8500 could work. If I were going to use an older, pre-G3 PowerMac though, I'd try and find either an 8600 or a 9600. The 8600 has three PCI slots, the 9600 has six. Both are alot easier to upgrade than the 8500 and the 9500 due to the construction of the chasis and the types of RAM they use. Both the 8600 and 9600 are generally faster computers too. I actually have an 8600 that I plan on some day tweaking out to do hard disk recording with.

Another Mac based CPU that would be nice to get your hands would be a UMAX s900. Six PCI slots, seven drive bays, and support for a gig of RAM.

With any pre-G3 PowerMac you do get a few choice bonuses:
SCSI support. SCSI hard drives are a lot faster than all but the newest IDE hard disks though more expensive.
You really don't have to worry about hurting the thing because it's not like you're working on a $4,000 PowerMac G4. You can find another one for a few hundred dollars, scavenge some spare parts, and you're ready to rock.

CD burning would only require that you buy a compatable CD burner, and they're quite easy to come by.

You'd actually be amazed to see how many "outdated" Mac systems are very hard at work today in the audio biz. As a matter of fact, all of the on location audio capture for Star Wars Episode I was done with a tweaked out PowerBook G3.

[Edited by Raskolnikov on 11-19-2001 at 07:29 PM]