If you need to buy good sequencing software anyway, I would recommend going with Logic Audio. The LA environment on the CD (Emagic folder) is really good. It comes in silver, gold and platinum. Silver being cheapest and platinum most expensive. It's excellent software. Not quite as straightforward and simple as Cubase, but once you start figuring it out, you find that it's a much more professional program. You're going to need a USB midi translator. Serial adapters don't work for MIDI. I've only looked into a couple. One from MIDIMan and one from MOTU. The MIDIMan cost twice as much as the MOTU and doesn't offer anything more. You get the driver you need with the MOTU box, it has two ins, two outs and a special thru switch for when you're not running it through your computer. Getting it to run was a bit of a hassle though, we had to install MOTU's FreeMIDI, find a new-ish version of OMS which somehow runs the freemidi setup. Kind of awkward but it worked.