Laptop recommendations?

[laughingtiger]

good laptop: sony vaio with a desktop cpu is the best bet for pc laptops.
mac is for peoples who can't make a pc work and for rich kids.mac doesn't crash so it's good for audio.but pc can be a real work horse if you can handle it.
my opinion is go for a vaio if you can it's solid.

Heh, some people will say the darnedest things to compensate for their penis size. =)

Cheerios!

[Guest]

PCs suck for audio. Every Studio in the world is Mac based.

It was Mac and Atari based ! As professional engineer i saw allready alot of studios, trust me. Go twice to the AES Convention and look who's booth is growing. Since years Merging is growing, a PC-System.

Apart of it - MAC sucks, Emagic sucks.

[bubba]

these holy war, mac/pc, things online are getting really tiresome. so many useful things that could have been said on this topic, and all people can do is argue the same crap they've argued for years. if you can make techno on a banjo, just do it. next time you get the urge to get into this type of thread war, just write one chord...for some of you, this will mean you'll actually have to write music instead of just talking about OS platforms. seriously...get a grip, and go write some music, and please drop this pedantic topic, because it just makes anyone who brings it up look silly.

Bubba

[Guest]

word, bubba.

[Alex Reynolds]

Flame wars aside, at least Mac users sign their posts, for whatever that's worth these days.

-Alex

[ZenMaster]

PCs suck for audio. Every Studio in the world is Mac based.

not really. Pretty much every studio in my hometown of Murfreesboro, TN (Just outside Nashville) are PC based studios. Of course, most of the guys who own these studios are in their mid to late 20's and have grown up being comfortable with PCs...and besides, any studio that is Mac based is probably a host based system and performance of the computer itself doesn't even matter.

I personally run an XP Pro machine using an AMD 2700+. I built it myself from scratch specifically for doing audio (oh yeh, and gaming - seperate hardware profile for that). I have had ZERO problems with any of the audio software on my system for one specific reason: I built the machine to record and mix audio; there is no crap on my system that could potentially cause problems. Macs come with all this iMovie, iPhoto, iThis, iThat, iThink iMgonnascream. Why can't I get a cheaper Mac that doesn't come with all this extra software I'm never gonna use? Or better yet, let me build my own friggin Mac!

Of course, when it comes to laptops, you can't really build your own so you're options go down pretty quick. My advice: buy the fastest laptop you can afford (keeping in mind that more gHz doesn't necessarily mean faster performance), format the hell out of that hard drive and only load the software you'll use and disable any hardware you don't need (modems, bluetooth, wireless cards, etc.). the Pentium M processor (not to be confused with the Pentium 4 M) would be your best choice if you can run off AC power. If you're forced to run off battery, try to get a laptop that has a regular desktop chip in it, as your performance won't take such a huge hit when not on AC.

[Guest]

I'm better than everybody.

[smutek]

I am a stupid jackass.

I'm not a "rich kid" and I could probably do a better repair job on most of the platforms out there than 99% of the guest trolls here, including you.

Save your silly venom for Slashdot.

-Alex

"The same ones who complain about you using a Mac are the same ones asking you to fix their PCs." --Anon.

spider venom!

I'll be getting my powerbook in about two weeks. Been waiting about a year for it.

Rich kids indeed.

[JuneLOpez]

The Mac and Pc war is over.

They pretty much do the same thing. However, you will find more Macs in studios than PCs.

I was intrested in getting a Pc laptop but I changed my mind and went with a mac Ti-G4... No problems!

The Pc on the other hand has to many configuration problems, so I do not want to spend time trying to deal with 1-800-I don't know what your problem is.

It's a given the OS on a PC is a joke, stick to a mac...

[FORMAT]

The general rule I think is very simple but only applies to laptop computers:
On PC laptops, you sometimes don't know what the components hidden inside are - they might be shared graphics cards and other performance bottlenecks.
Many articles have been written about this, e.g. on RME's site.
Effectively, you may get a cheaper notebook on the PC side, with impressive GHz specificaton, but the hardware might be of so low a quality that a lot of the "rated" performance is effectively lost.
On the mac, you pretty much know what the configuration is and they write the OS for a smaller number of components, so the fact that compatibilty is less of an issue makes perfect sense doesn't it?

Now, this doesn't mean anything in the real world. I own a TiBook with both OS 9 and X, and it does crash. You're supposed to defragment and take care of your OS regularly. There are incompatibilities with hardware or drivers. Even OS X - supposedly the most stable OX - has crashed on me more than once with no other option but a "cold start".
That said, I still love my TiBook. It may not be able to handle two instances of Tassman and three Amplitubes at the same time, and its screen redraw is super slow, but it's still fun.

So why am I writing all this? Well, I'm coming to the conclusion that, for live music (and this includes performances by people who, with their laptops, look like they are checking their email), hardware boxes are probably the better option [at least from the stage presence/performance point of view]. And I'm contemplating going that route right now with the new Electribe SX thing.

Have any of you thought about this as well?

[/i]

[smutek]

hardware boxes are probably the better option [at least from the stage presence/performance point of view]. And I'm contemplating going that route right now with the new Electribe SX thing.

Have any of you thought about this as well?

[/i]

My new powerbook is scheduled to be delivered this tuesday!

Anyway,

I'm not one hundred percent sure I agree with you. I think the stage presence/performance thing is largely dependent on the performer. I think the dude who looks like he's checking his email would probably look just as boring running an electribe.

On a semi related note,

I just picked up "Live Extracts" by Stewart Walker, out on Tresor. Good stuff. This guy plays live using an Akai mpc-2000, Emu E5000, a pocket fader, a Pioneer EFX-500 and a DJM-600 mixer. Check it out if you haven't already.

[FORMAT]

You've got a point there, but you would still see the guy working the faders and knobs if he had a groove box, see what I mean? It's more physical, but you're right, there's performers and there's non-performers.

[feddle]

i use a 1gig g4 and it works really well with live. I can get 7 tracks with a reverb (on economy) and only use 80% of the processor power

[smutek]

i use a 1gig g4 and it works really well with live. I can get 7 tracks with a reverb (on economy) and only use 80% of the processor power

Wow, thats wierd. I just had 8 tracks going on my g3 650 mghz 512 with reverb on first class and I was at 59%. This was about two minutes ago.

[kid music]

Hi. I'm thinking about getting Live, and using it on stage with a laptop. In the studio I use ProTools HD3 (mostly) on a Mac G4 800 (single CPU) desktop. I also use ACID on an old PC.

One thing that concerns me is how much power (tracks/fx...) people are saying in this thread that they get from their relatively new laptops. I know it's not a fair comparison, but I easily get over 70 tracks with 4 quality fx on every track, and all the tracks are playing off of 1 internal IDE audio drive. So when I read about 7 or 8 tracks with very few fx, I don't understand.

Is that using the internal drive of the laptop? Is that normal? Is that enough for onstage performance??

Thanks,

-kid music