Laptop recommendations?

FORMAT · Post by **FORMAT** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 12:05 pm

It’s also beyond me why someone would get 7 tracks one reverb and 80 percent CPU usage and call this „satisfactory“

I think that you would be able to play a good live set with between 10 and 15 tracks, you certainly don’t need 70!

I typically do around 15-20 in Live with effects and hardly get CPU meter readings above 60 %

Per Boysen · Post by **Per Boysen** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 12:47 pm

stew wrote:If latency is your only complaint you have about your Thinkpad, just buy a decent external sound card. Newer, fancier and faster notebooks are very likely to not give you any improvement in terms of latency.

Yes, that's exactly what I did. I picked up that Ableton "special offer to registered users" RME Multiface with the buscard interface. The latency is so low that I can use the P3 700 Mhz laptop as my guitar amp fx box as well. And the RME 8/8 break-out box can double as a patch bay to integrate external gear into Live. I'm very happy with the Multiface!

smutek · Post by **smutek** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 1:50 pm

FORMAT wrote:It’s also beyond me why someone would get 7 tracks one reverb and 80 percent CPU usage and call this „satisfactory“

I think that 80% post was a provocation.

I was also wondering, in what type of situation would one want to have 70 tracks running simultaneously?

kid music · Post by **kid music** » Sat Jan 31, 2004 7:44 pm

The 70 tracks I'm referring to is in the studio, not onstage. And I rarely get that high in track count. But my job is often mixing complex arrangements; the track count usually gets well over 40.

Anyway, I know I won't need that many tracks for an onstage performance. I'm just surprised that a laptop with Live software would get so few tracks.

Perhaps some people could give their track/fx counts along with the laptop's soundcard, CPU, Ram, and Hard drive specs? That would be very helpful.

-kid music

sly revolutionary · Post by **sly revolutionary** » Sun Feb 01, 2004 4:01 am

You should buy whatever makes you happy and gets in your way the least.

Buy the machine that will make you happy and buy the best you can afford. Then ignore people who tell you that you're wrong and just make the music. Within two years the people who were shouting at you to buy this machine or that machine will be shouting that you should buy something else entirely.

For me, I don't want to tinker with the OS or the hardware. I got my geek rocks off years ago. These days I'm more interested in the actual task at hand, and that task is the music, so the less I need to think about the technology - particularly the technology that is not directly related to making music - the better. (This is why I bought Live - because it cuts through the distractions and focusses on the tools I need.)

I design software for Windows, but my music computer is a Mac. I have a choice of using whatever I like, and for me the Mac "just works" more often than not. I'm a knob-twiddler who loves mixing desks more than .ini files, and with my G4 laptop (new 15") I can concentrate on the music, not the machine. But that's just me.

slyrevolutionary

FORMAT · Post by **FORMAT** » Sun Feb 01, 2004 3:23 pm

Per Boysen wrote:The latency is so low that I can use the P3 700 Mhz laptop as my guitar amp fx box as well.

What plugins/progs do you use for guitar effect processing?

fsk- · Post by **fsk-** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 1:27 am

its simple:

pc's have lots of different drivers / chipsets / makes / brands. Because of therebeing so many sometimes some hardware + software wont work well on 1 brand than on the other even tho they r the same spec. It could be the chipset or the drivers etc. A good example could be an ATi graphics card working better than an Nvidia card for some games compared to others.

But, with macs.... theres only 1 real route u can go down and it makes life so much easier as it means if it says its compatible with mac, it means its compatible with mac! if it says its compatible with windows, u gotta make sure it runs with ur chip!? the chipset, the motherboard, the soundcard, the bloooobalahs etc etc.

So its up to u, As a pissed off windows user I do wish I had got a mac, but I can live with it.

- fsk!

smutek · Post by **smutek** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 4:40 am

My new powerbook arrived about two hours ago! 15" 1.25!

Alex Reynolds · Post by **Alex Reynolds** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 4:50 am

Congratulations! I envy you... (at least until I get my G5 PB!)

-Alex

FORMAT · Post by **FORMAT** » Tue Feb 03, 2004 8:33 am

fsk- wrote:its simple:

pc's have lots of different drivers / chipsets / makes / brands. Because of therebeing so many sometimes some hardware + software wont work well on 1 brand than on the other even tho they r the same spec. It could be the chipset or the drivers etc. A good example could be an ATi graphics card working better than an Nvidia card for some games compared to others.

But, with macs.... theres only 1 real route u can go down and it makes life so much easier as it means if it says its compatible with mac, it means its compatible with mac! if it says its compatible with windows, u gotta make sure it runs with ur chip!? the chipset, the motherboard, the soundcard, the bloooobalahs etc etc.

So its up to u, As a pissed off windows user I do wish I had got a mac, but I can live with it.

- fsk!

Well said fsk! I've posted replies to the same question with this exact reply over and over, so why can't somebody just make a sticky post in this forum saying "Read This When You Can't Decide Between Mac and PC and don't bother to post" ....

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Thu Feb 05, 2004 8:06 am

Live OS X is a single icon that you put in your Applications folder. You run it, choose the audio interface you want it to use from a drop-down list, choose the MIDI interface you want it to use from a drop-down list, and go. If you have plugged on two FireWire interfaces and two USB interfaces and one PC Card they will all be there in the list in Live through CoreAudio. From what I understand, it is not this easy to administer Live on PC systems.

Out of the box the Apple systems are already DAW's, with Garage Band on there and talking to the internal audio hardware with CoreAudio, so you add Live and you keep on trucking. I've been running Live on OS X since Live 1.1 (early 2002) and it is ridiculously stable without VST, and very stable with good VST's.

If you get a non-Apple notebook, make sure you've seen it in action with Live and the audio hardware you're going to use before you buy. In other words, if you see a guy at a local club spinning Live on a particular Toshiba with a particular audio interface and it is great then get exactly that Toshiba and exactly that audio interface. In other words, treat working PC setups as precious information because the manufacturers aren't testing for music and audio except for Apple, and nobody has built new audio plumbing yet like OS X.

Also, HFS+ is much faster for audio work than either FAT or NTFS, and you can access Sound Designer (Pro Tools) audio files. I also find the Mac's virtual disks (disk images) to be an amazing way to archive work, with encryption and the whole disk the work lives on included in the archive.

Cool Mac-only audio apps: M, Pluggo, ArtMatic, Soundtrack, Garage Band (free), iTunes (free), Logic Express, Logic Pro, iMovie (free), MetaSynth.

Also if you like Pro Tools hardware you can hook into that in OS X through Direct I/O. I run Live that way in my studio and it's really great audio quality. I run Live on Direct I/O and everything else uses CoreAudio.

FORMAT · Post by **FORMAT** » Thu Feb 05, 2004 10:17 am

Well said guest / couldnt have said it better myself

Laptop recommendations?

The less I notice the computer, the better

Apple