Ableton Forum

Im gonna be running a Ableton Suite 8/Record 1.5 setup and incorporating various VSTs (trillian, massive, Albino 3, etc..) along the way... I have about a $1300 Budget and Im looking at the new base Model 13' Macbook Pro... Will I have any problems with the below specs?

2.3GHz Dual-core Intel Core i5
4GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x2GB
320GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm

Your biggest limiting factor will be your dual core and liberal use of VSTs - they eat CPU like crazy.

I'm running Suite 8 with as many as 37 tracks grouped on Kick, Perc, Bass, Synth, FX busses, liberal use of effects racks on both the instruments and the busses as well as 2 sends (long and short 'verb), and mastering effects.

This uses about 30-40% of the Ableton processor utilization (not the same as task manager CPU utilization) with plenty of headroom, but I'm running an:

Sony Vaio F-Series laptop with Intel Core i7 740 QM at 1.73 GHz (which throttles up to 2.9 GHz as needed), 6Gb RAM and Win 7 64 bit.

Under Win 7 the hyperthreading capability of the I7 gives you as many as 8 virtual cores but most of the time I've seen 4-6 in use under heavy load. The machine barely breaks a sweat and there's no interruption or sacrifice of audio quality under these conditions.

Most of my instruments are either Suite 8 instruments (Analog, Collision, Tension, Impulse, Sampler, Simpler, Operator) but I've used these as a base and made my own Instrument Racks which I reuse from project to project. I only have 3 VSTs - DMS Dimension (soundfont based synth), Harmony Improvisator and NeonGate but I've found that given the rich capabilities of the Ableton instruments supplied with Suite 8 I really don't need external VSTs to get the job done.

Point I'm trying to make is if you can go with a quad core i7 you'd have a lot of headroom to grow into. My Sony Vaio cost $1049 from Tiger Direct.com - well within your budget, and if you really wanted to load MacOS you could install another boot partition to do so and boot it instead of the Win 7 it comes preloaded with.

you will be fine. better specs than most people using live...

you will be fine. better specs than most people using live...