I'm looking to buy a MAC to run music and video software. What specs are most important?
I am thinking maybe a Macbook with 4gb of ram and a 250gb hard drive.
Looking to buy a Mac Laptop to use with Ableton.
-
Lo-Fi Massahkah
- Posts: 3604
- Joined: Fri Jun 04, 2004 2:57 pm
- Location: The south east suburbs of Malmö, Sweden.
Re: Looking to buy a Mac Laptop to use with Ableton.
CPU is important for overall "snappiness". Also if you wanna run alot of softsynths and effects. Any dual core is fine. But more is better.vandons wrote:I'm looking to buy a MAC to run music and video software. What specs are most important?
I am thinking maybe a Macbook with 4gb of ram and a 250gb hard drive.
RAM is important if you run several applications in parallell. Also if you run softsamplers with large libraries or wanna load a lot of audio clips into RAM. I find 2gb is OK. 4 gb is plenty!
HD speed is important if you wanna run loads of audio tracks at the same time. Both playback and recording. I get by fine with 5400 rpm and can easily manage 12-16 tracks of 44.1 khz, 16 bit audio. 7200 or 10000 of course caters for more.
A separate graphics card (not sharing memory) frees up system RAM and leaves the main CPU doing it's thing. Apart from gaming and of course video/photo editing it also gives the system an overall "snappiness" by taking some load of the CPU.
.m
Last edited by Lo-Fi Massahkah on Sun May 11, 2008 5:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Re: Looking to buy a Mac Laptop to use with Ableton.
and to clarify a bit: on OSX that means getting a macbook pro.Lo-Fi Massahkah wrote:A separate graphics card (not sharing memory) frees up system RAM and leaves the main CPU doing it's thing. Apart from gaming and of course video/photo editing it also gives the system an overall "snappiness" be taking some load of the CPU.
.m
