Mac for Abelton

[Slydell1]

Hello all. I’ve read through lots of forums on this subject. I just wanted to hear some opinions on my current situation before I make a decision. I run Abelton 10 on a mid 2012 MacBook Pro i5, 8g ram, 512 ssd. I don’t use many 3rd party plugins but that could change. I love serum but don’t do any thing heavy on cpu and bounce my tracks to audio regularly. I’ve been having preformance issues with crashing and whatnot. So I figure my options are eithe max out my currrent computer by adding 16g crucial ram and hope it works, or get a mid 2012 with the i7 maxed out, or save up for a new computer. I have only ran daw on Mac although I grew up on windows. I am not very techy though. I’d consider switching to windows but I’m worried that my lack of computer skills might get me in a bind as to where Mac is pretty idiot proof. I’ve also read that my interface, motu ultralite mk4 has driver issues with windows. Thanks for any and all help. Really looking forward to taking the plunge and be able to create more worry free.

[TLW]

A quad (or more) core i7 or i9 is going to be a lot better than an i5 or dual-core i7.

I doubt lack of RAM is going to be causing crashes - but you can of course check how much RAM and cpu is being used in activity monitor.

I used PC DAWs for nearly 20 years and have also used Macs for years. Windows 10 promoted us to move entirely to Macs and we haven’t regretted it. PCs can make very good DAWs and in terms of power/price ratio are more appealing than Macs, but compared to Macs they can also require a lot of careful parts selection, tuning and tweaking to get them to work optimally, especially laptop PCs. Sometimes a commercial “off the shelf” PC makes a good DAW, sometimes it doesn’t.

Bottom line comes down to which operating system you prefer, how happy you are to maybe have to do some configuring yourself to get low latency and the available budget.

Having said that, current MBPs don’t have enough Thunderbolt/USB connectors for my liking because I need to feed MIDI to a bunch of synths plus connect external drives and the audio interface. If I worked entirely in the computer that wouldn’t be so much of an issue. The 2019 iMacs don’t suffer from that problem, though using the latest Mojave release (10.14.4) seems advisable for DAWs because earlier releases had problems with low latency audio on 2018 and 2019 models. There are long threads about this on RME’s forums.

In my experience, Live and Mojave work together very well by the way.

[8E]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=947op8yKJRY

Do not.