Enough Performance with a MacBook Pro???

[Pascal_1983]

Hi

I am thinking of getting a Macbook Pro Laptop with Ableton Live and am wondering if I will have enough performance.

I mostly have around 20 tracks, 20 songs on cue, on all of the tracks heavy automation and around 4-6 effects. I also will do a lot of real-time automation with ipad/keyboard/lemur. And the tracks will consist of all VST-Instruments, not a lot of Audio-Tracks.

My soundcard of choice will be a Apogee Duet.

Now my question: Does anybody have this sort of setup? Is there enough CPU? Or will a Laptop hang?

Thanks for your inputs.

cheers Pascal

[Guillermo Barrancos]

You have to go with the 15inch MacBook Pro (with or without Retina) and then you can opt for the QuadCore i7 CPU.
Put in enough RAM (8GB should be sufficient, but you should check your current RAM consumption if you need more than that).
Especially with the Retina edition, you have to go all out, as you cannot upgrade later on.
That´s what I did. 15inch Retina, 8GB of RAM, 2,7GHz Core i7 and 512GB SSD.

PS. The retina MacBook Pro´s have been refreshed in March this year with the very latest Ivy Bridge CPU´s (i7-3740QM), before Intel switched to Haswell. So you can´t go wrong there.

[BoddAH]

There's this misconception about CPU requirements among producers.

We're way past the time when you had to have a powerful CPU to even be able to make music with Ableton without having to freeze tracks all the time.

Nowadays, any dual-core or quad-core standard notebook or desktop CPU will do the job.

I know producers who are perfectly happy to use a MacBook Air simply because they don't use too many tracks, use relatively CPU friendly plugins and don't mind freezing a track or two when they push their hardware too far once every blue moon.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are producers who stack U-He Divas on all their tracks, use Lexicon Reverbs across the board and generally make tracks that would bring even the most powerful desktop computers money can buy to their knees in a matter of 3 or 4 tracks.

As a rule, the amount of tracks you have and even the amount of synths and effects don't matter. There's synths or plugins out there which are literally 20 times more CPU intensive than more CPU friendly alternatives. I'm not even sure automation plays a role at all.

But if you want just a general indication, let's say a top of the line desktop computers offers 100% performance.
A top of the line quad core notebook (15" rMBP) would be about 70% of that.
A top dual core notebook (13" rMBP) would be about 50%.
A MacBook Air would be about 40%.

[gnurf]

I did more than the OP wants to do with my old Core 2 Duo MacBook. I also had an octopus-like USB device setup to go with it :)

The i-series of Intel CPUs are significantly faster than the old C2Ds, so you should be fine with any quad-core, or even a dual-core. But I'd go for 15" and 4 cores if it's for real live use with Live. i5 and i7 *might* not make much difference, but again things might change if you have effects which can benefit from virtual threads. The i7's slightly larger caches should theoretically benefit real-time audio processing (small bits of data that need to be handled fast).

For comparison: My desktop PC is an i5-3570, and my main workhorse is my Mac mini, 2.3GHz i7. For all practical purposes they're about the same speed, with the i7 being better for running virtualised operating systems, and a few mathematical benchmarks. That's a lower-wattage mobile CPU matching a hotter desktop CPU clocked about 50% higher.

The 2.4GHz i7 Retina MBP is nearly twice as fast as the 2.6GHz i5 model, if you go by raw benchmark numbers. Don't you want all that power? ;)

Note: Retina MBPs have on-board RAM. Choose the maximum at purchase, feel the sting in your wallet/bank account, and live happily ever after.

[Guillermo Barrancos]

There's this misconception about CPU requirements among producers.

We're way past the time when you had to have a powerful CPU to even be able to make music with Ableton without having to freeze tracks all the time.

Nowadays, any dual-core or quad-core standard notebook or desktop CPU will do the job.

I know producers who are perfectly happy to use a MacBook Air simply because they don't use too many tracks, use relatively CPU friendly plugins and don't mind freezing a track or two when they push their hardware too far once every blue moon.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are producers who stack U-He Divas on all their tracks, use Lexicon Reverbs across the board and generally make tracks that would bring even the most powerful desktop computers money can buy to their knees in a matter of 3 or 4 tracks.

As a rule, the amount of tracks you have and even the amount of synths and effects don't matter. There's synths or plugins out there which are literally 20 times more CPU intensive than more CPU friendly alternatives. I'm not even sure automation plays a role at all.

But if you want just a general indication, let's say a top of the line desktop computers offers 100% performance.
A top of the line quad core notebook (15" rMBP) would be about 70% of that.
A top dual core notebook (13" rMBP) would be about 50%.
A MacBook Air would be about 40%.

CPU always has been the bottleneck among producers, diehard video editors and digital artists.

Especially, as producers and/or live performer, when you use sertain 3rd party software synths that are polyphonic capable and use large patches, they can generate a lot of CPU load.

But sure, if you have an extremely Limited Budget, there are work arounds where you record each track and/or loop seperately and immediately convert it to audio format. That way you can reduce CPU load significantly.
A bit cumbersome and limits Your creative freedom a bit. But doable for the Budget concious among us who have to do With low end Equipment.

So it´s up to the OP the decide what to do With the info given.

[doncolga]

FWIW, my computer in my signature is doing nicely. My projects are not large, but I'm very happy so far. I'm at about 7 ms round trip latency in Live 9 with a Focusrite 18i8 USB 2. So far I'm using only vst's and just my internal drive.