Ableton Forum

today what are the important brands/parts to make sure I get for a strictly
music pc.
I have monitor, soundcard, and external hard drives already.
what do you recommend me?

buy a mac...

It's a good idea to look at your soundcard manufacturers site to see if there are any known issues and incompatibility and for that matter to google the name of your soundcard and issues.

It is possible to configure a great PC desktop system but I would advice against taking a chance on a store bought PC laptop system and rather opt for some kind of Mac Laptop or a model configured by as specialist in making PC's for music production.

Sound on Sound magazine reviews some professionally built PC desktop DAW systems and they list the spec so you could copy that and making sure that there are no known issues between the parts of the system and your soundcard.

At the moment I am in the same situation as you - looking to buy a new computer as a DAW. My requirements are for it to be portable, run Ableton at gigs, to be good for graphic design work (running Adobe products) and for it to be a glitch free (no pop or crackles) DAW for music production.

My Toshiba laptop is very bad LOL. I've duel booted this thing with Vista and XP and ran the DPC latency checker and configured each OS to be set up for music as detailed by Martin Walker from Sound on Sound and Audio Technology magazines but this thing is still failing miserably! I'm mainly running Sonar PE as my DAW and Cakewalk are some kind of partner with Microsoft so things should work but no.

I think its a mixture of things - cheap chinese power supply, intels built-in graphics (no graphics chip), some plug-in compatibility issues, heck I'm even going to check the ram. Poor drivers with my Steinberg MR816CSX etc. Desktop systems don't have many of these issues and you can swop out the cards until you hit the golden combo, but sheesh I'm finding it hard to run a windows system. LOL

I'm thinking of going for a 13" MacBook Pro 2.66GHZ processor with a solid state hard drive and getting some kind of snazzy monitor for graphic design work. I've read rumours that the same speck of CPU and graphics chip is going into the regular MacBook though...

Best of luck with your DAW build.
Pimpleburger

thanks for tips, I have a mac already, I want a desktop pc for music and video only, I already know the video card i'm getting and i already have the soundcard, but what about

cpu
motherboard
powersupply
fan

I'm not sure what is the best way to go.

another question, if you get a solid state hard drive and put that in a macbook, how much faster would it make such a laptop?

^^^ that one is truely a monster.. the i7-extreme is hella expensive..usb3 ready...12GB RAM..yummy

wow and yes very much expensive for my blood, what if I only wanted to spend $600 duros?

not eulars?

Just a heads up,

Somewhere else in the forum states that Live only uses dual-core processing... or doesn't support multithreading well.. or basically that the newest core7 with 8 cores has no use with Live..

Also.. it can't use more than 2.5 gb of RAM or something..

Been looking to get a laptop for Live.. so I've been lookin this stuff up too.. interesting to know

this is important info then, ^^ so what you are saying is that a quad core amd/intel machine is
worthless for using with ableton Live?
what can I do then and is this only an ableton issue, I was hoping to get a maschine by the native instruments because it looks like a great partner for Live?

Drivers are not likely the cause of you issues (or the worst of them) with the Steinberg MR816CSX, it's far more likely your Toshiba has a crummy firewire chipset (such as ricoh, ene, o2 or generic) rather than a Texas Instruments chipset (99% of pc laptop don't have TI chipsets anymore).

You can also try downloading and using the asio4all driver, although you will not be able to access the DSP fx in the interface if you do this.

This is not an issue with desktops, where you just pick up a PCI-E to firewire card with TI chipset, which is rock solid with a good interface.

i'm sorry i don't have a toshiba computer, i'm looking for recommendations for a new system.

it's directed at pimpleburger who replied to this thread

oh ok, hey i could use some help too

may pc crashed then i build up a new system, quite worth every euro...

1x ASUS P5QL-Pro - 63,91 EUR
1x RAM DD2 4GB PC1066 Kingston HyperX Kit of 2 - 84,64 EUR
1x Intel® Core 2 Duo E8400 3,00GHz box - 141,18 EUR
1x 640GB WD WD6400AAKS - 16MB 44,41 EUR
1x 425W Enermax Pro82+ EPR425AWT 57,94 EUR

Windows 7 64bit Home Premium Systembuilder is at around 80€ur

i reuse my chieftec tower and a old msi gt6600 gfx with passive cooling...

Soundcard: M-Audio Delta 1010LT - 5years old - my advice!

my system is running w/o overcloking and works very stable... it speed up Live, its a joy!

peace
T