Ableton Forum

ok, i've been interested in getting a powerbook for a while and of course following all the post regarding them and other notebooks by the people on the forum who really seem to know what they're doing. what do you guys think of this thread on kvr, please hold the religous philosophies and cult worship, microsoft hatred, and passion of the christ used a mac type urges you might have. i'm just looking for some definitive opinions, especialy from you adamjay cause I think you just got a mac but to me it
looks like I need to wait a bit.

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic ... sc&start=0

as with anything,
its what you're doing.

the topic starter at KVR was talking about how crap his Apple is when running Reaktor's GoBox and Absynth.

firstly, if Person A doesn't know that NI products are written for x86 and merely ported to Mac (and NI performance has always and always will SUCK on MacOS), well then thats Person A's fault for not researching the purchase. Obviously the topic starter did not know this and it came at him as a sudden surprise.

Now, there are free Apple AU's that are quite effecient and quite capable.
"Generator" is an apple only synth plugin that blows away NI's Pro-53.
and it requires 3 times less CPU... kinda evens the playing field doesn't it? the same can be said for the Apple AU plugs that are included in OSX.3 Panther, they are free and require far less cpu than Ableton's built-in FX.

if you're going to drop $2G's on a laptop, know what you are getting into.
i think the thread at KVR comes down to someone who didn't know what they were getting into.

when i bought my powerbook did i know that running nothing but ableton and its own internal FX, i'd be taking a SERIOUS performance hit?
yes.
did i know how to compensate for that by using other tools that are just as capable, yet only available on the Mac platform?
yes, again.

on the Live 4 front, once this application gets support for Altivec instruction, the whole dynamic will change.
and it WILL happen.

i got the powerbook for many reasons, some of which don't concern ableton performance.
But, with regards to live it was because there were enough Mac-Only tools that i prefered to some of the tools i was using on PC (fx and synths). And in the end, i get just as good performance. Before, my live set on the PC would rarely go over 23%. Now on the powerbook, substitute some FX and synths for AU's that i prefered over PC VST's, i rarely go over 26%. not that much of a performance hit in the end really.

with anything you do on a computer, your choice of an Operating System should depend on the applications and plugins that you plan to use within that Operating System. If the original poster at KVR planned to make heavy use of Native Instruments products, and no Macintosh AU's, then he/she had no business replacing their Centrino laptop.

Ableton as a sequencer or "DAW" is a perfect analogy for what you must consider in terms of sacrificing performance for other features. In Live, on pc or mac, we lose cpu cycles at the expense of being able to do anything in realtime and use audio like clay, being able to mold it however we wish.
On a PC you sacrifice security for a larger selection of commercially available software, games, and a marginal processing boost in such applications
On a Mac you sacrifice a larger selection of commercially available software, games, and marginal processing boost in such applications for having a secure operating system that is easy to mold with the help of Unix line commands for more advanced users.

So really, it depends what you want from a computer. Do you want to run 14 instances of Ambience Reverb in Cubase? nah, neither do i.
and if you are unhappy with a purchase, there's a 90% chance you made an uneducated purchase. The internet is full of information, reviews, comparisons, benchmarks, etc. Use it.

As a mac aficionado, I should note that yes, this is thread has some good points. The g4 is a pretty shoddy cpu, and apple apparently agreed as they ditched motorola and had ibm design the g5. That being said, I use a mac because I find that the OS and the hardware are high enough quality that I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of performance for it.

But since this debate is basically about the g4 vs. the pentium, let me make a quick example free from this particular argument and deep in the heart of another one. At the place where I work, I'm responsible for administering a number of unix servers (among other things). We have two boxes both running solaris 9, which is an OS made by sun microsystems, for those not in the know. One of them is a sunfire v220, which boasts two ultrasparcIII chips at approximately 2Ghz each. The other is a dell power-something-or-another with dual intel xeons at about 3Ghz each. Both machines have the same amount of ram, and are both using high powered SCSI hard drives.

Now, sun's us3 is a lot like apple's g5... it's a good chip, but the clock speed just isn't as high as it's intel counterparts. When it comes to number crunching, the sun box gets it's ass stomped by the dual xeon, which can happily chirp through large data sets at a much faster rate, despite the fact that it's a 32-bit chip and the us3 is 64-bit. However, the large pipelining abilities of the us3 make the sun box capable of hosting a much larger number of concurrent tasks... during a standard workday, the process table has anywhere from 300-500 simultaneously running programs... and I'll be damned if that box still isn't fast. The xeon has a tendency to flake out after about 200, and it generally has to be rebooted about every 2-3 weeks. The sun box, on the other hand, generally goes months without any type of problems. Granted, part of this is due to the stability of x86 solaris, but nonetheless, we're retiring the dell box and converting it into a node in our windows cluster. It's got good hardware, but for what we need it to do, that hardware is meaningless.

So, the point of my story (other than giving me a chance to ramble for a little while ) is that performance isn't necessarily everything. Intel has done an awesome job of marketing to the public that faster clock speeds equal faster performance, but as always, you have to consider more than just the little number attached to the box before making your purchase. I'd consider what you want to use this laptop for, and which machine will give you the optimal experience doing this. If you don't think a mac has enough cpu power to run the type of stuff you want to do, get a PC that will. If you don't think that a PC can appropriatly handle your hardware or isn't stable enough for what you need, get a mac. Either way, you should really know both sides of the story before making a decision...

It doesn't really matter what you get. Mac/PC.....it is a matter of what you SPEND. I have had both platforms and whenever i saved a few bucks, i sacrificed a great deal as far as stability and capabilty is concerned. This is using either desktops or laptops/powerbooks. I admit I haven't used a powerbook for some time after realizing i could get the same power for a cheaper price using Windows (cheaper but still not cheap).
I currently own a Vaio laptop along with a desktop. I use my desktop for EVERYTHING except music apps. All my music apps are on my vaio and NOTHING ELSE. This helps BIG time. I am sure if you use a powerbook or laptop exclusively for musical applications (that means no internet,games,office apps etc.) you will be content. SO far so good for me

Former Pharaoh wrote: All my music apps are on my vaio and NOTHING ELSE. This helps BIG time. I am sure if you use a powerbook or laptop exclusively for musical applications (that means no internet,games,office apps etc.) you will be content. SO far so good for me

This is the major difference between mac and PC. The only performance gain I get from any trimming down in OSX is to turn off the airport card, and repair permissions every once in a while. I can have a bazzillion apps in OSX and they don't affect the audio performance in the least.
In OS9 it was probably worse than 98 in that extensions to the system would hinder audio performance. Apple had an extensions manager that allowed you to tailor extension sets to your particular needs. Even then having more than audio applications on your audio computer wasn't the kind of problem people report in PC land....
Anyway I would prefer to have both if I had the cash.

It seems to me that the KVR post could be a planted message...guerilla marketing, if you will.

Otherwise, the user must be completely clueless about how to maximize a macintosh for audio, not apple-head iphotoing.

It is not enough to simply buy a fast computer, you have to optimize it, and likely coming from a PC, one might not know how.

I have a 867 MHZ powerbook, 1 GB ram, original everything else.
I run Max/MSP/Jitter, Live and Reason, and run a bunch of vsts in addition. I usually dont break 50% cpu. Apple has earned my faith, as well as my disgust for some of their simply horrid ideas. But the powerbook, was one of the good ones.

-Computo

yeah what I hear usualy is that pcs are faster and macs more stable, i don't believe this. I've had a mac before and I've have a pc now, I think the stability depends on the user, I have not had stability issues with either. I really want a mac for reasons like running external hardrives off of the firewire bus and some of the mac only apps and convieneces but Live is the most important app for me right now and I find that there aren't that many problems associated with pc vstis, I agree with the prior post about having both just not able to afford it right now. I don't even know what I'm sayin anymore i'm just dissapointed that I can't get the performance i want. I hope apple does a flipflop and comes out with something as cool looking as the 12"ibook, and as light as the under 3lb centrinos and as powerful as the centrinos, keeping the apple convieneces

As you've seen by all the previous replies, it eventually boils down to what's right for you.

Since I own both PC and Mac, I don't consider myself a bigot in either direction...the systems work fine for what I need them to do. That said, here's my rough analogy. I look at the CURRENT line of Mac Powerbooks (this note BTW is written on a Powerbook) similar to a VCR purchase I might make. There are plenty of very decent VCR machines out there, but I know that going into that buying decision, I'm getting a machine that has some lesser features than a DVD machine. But maybe all I need is a VCR, if so then that's fine for me. The problem is when I start trying to get the same picture from my VCR as I get with my DVD...it's just not gonna happen.

The G4 is a nice processor, the Altivec instruction set is nice, but fundamentally, the G4 is an older technology. Not worse, just older. Notebooks are tough to design for anyway: Do I want to have something high powered, then deal with heat issues and decreased battery life...or do I lessen the throughput, add to battery life and minimize heat issues, at the cost of slower running apps.

The latest versions of the Intel line for notebooks are pretty nifty chips...they've done some pretty cool things with pipelining, caching, instruction peeking. The days of raw RISC vs. CISC comparisons are long past.

Apple doesn't make their own chips, they've been beholden to IBM, Motorola, and now Freescale. I think it's a telling tale if you spend some time browsing Freescale and Intel's chip sites and see the roadmaps for each of the main processors used in today's laptop's.

In the end, it's what you need. FWIW, I migrated off of Mac's (a G3 Powerbook and G4 Desktop) to an IBM T40 (Centrino) and home built Intel system because it was cost-effective first, and the technology and OS's bias (my own) followed a close second. I still think the Mac stuff looks nice, but as music platforms, the ROI just tilted away from Mac and towards PC...for me.

Best of luck!

Tom

I'd prefer a Volvo to a japanese sportscar anyways...

-Paws

I think the stability depends on the user

Amen

It's actually really easy to setup windows to run for years without a
reboot. Maybe not quite as stable as FreeBSD, but much easier to
configure.

-Ben

You know, when Live is used as an audio effects host, MIDI sequencer, and sampler, the CPU usage on a Mac isn't very much at all. Rather than buying software synthesizers, I've been buying hardware. Hardware tends to sound better, and in many ways can simply be "better" that software. Sometimes it can be cheaper. I like to think of Live as a cheaper and more powerful version of a hardware sequencer like an MPC.

If you're really concerned about CPU usage, forget software synthesis. Go to Ebay or your local pawn shop and get a deal on a piece of hardware for $300. It's cheaper than buying a ram or cpu upgrade, and shit, you'll have a beautiful box to look at. You may even be able to use it as a controller for other stuff.

i agree with computo. after reading the thread at kvr, it seems suspiciously like guerilla marketing.
I generally don't try to get involved with the whole pc vs. mac thing because it reminds me of the white trash chevy vs. ford debate. in the end, they're just competing products with similar value propositions... but in the computing world (and perhpas the automotive world, as well) marketing tactics have run amok!

here we go here we go here we go.. nah nah nah , nah nah nah , nah nah nah naaaaaaaaaaaaaah..


one side says "ohh ohhh OS OS!!" and " security security!!!" and one side says "affordabilty " "power" and the other replies " reliability" and the other says "more apps" blah blah

its all
1. bollocks
2. whatever you want it to be (as in, get a laptop (mac or pc) and make it as secure, reliable , powerfull - YOURSELF - )

i am on my fourth mac with osX and i have never had any performance related gripes....i get my shit done. also, i consider my macs my friends as compared to my windows boxes of the old days. using a mac has been nothing but a pleasure. when driving around in centeral pennsylvania, look for the blue 1991 buick roadmaster estate wagon with the apple sticker on it...then try to knock me off the road to say hi...warning: i drive with my ipod on...