Ableton Forum

Hey guys hope I'm not posting on the wrong thread. I've been looking into macbooks to produce music. They go by 4GB of RAM and 8GB of RAM. I know more RAM is better but would I really need 8GB of RAM? I'm planning on using Ableton on it to produce music and mixing. So I would use a lot of vsts and effects and probably some midi controller too. So would you guys suggest 8GB of RAM or do I really not need that much?

hi,

buy the macbook with 4gb ram and check it if its works...
later you can upgrade your mac. dont buy the ram in the apple store, check the prizes in the net.

i bought yesterday 2x 4gb ram and quite happy

RAM is cheap. Get as much as you want, but not on the Apple Store. A two-4 GB sticks RAM kit costs $50. Get a MBP with 4 GB, then buy a 8 GB kit and install it yourself (or ask a friend to do it) if you find ou you really need more than 4 GB.

Okay so I can just upgrade it and install extra RAM. But why is everyone is saying not to get it from the apple store?

Lol. Well thanks for the help guys, I really appreciate it. Probably gonna get the 4GB one then

i would recommend you check OWC (other world computing). They have the products that u need 4gb,6gb,8gb rams and they have customer reviews so u can refer to what u like and trust and go for it..
cheers

Maybe check prices at Crucial as well. Fast delivery for competitive prices.
You can search for RAM by mac model number so you basically always have the correct type.

if you're just gonna use live, get 4gb, because live can't access more.
that's 3gb on osx, and about 2gb on windows. the rest is reserved for your os.

icanseeclearlynowtherainhasgone wrote:

Lunax wrote:Okay so I can just upgrade it and install extra RAM. But why is everyone is saying not to get it from the apple store?

i believe the apple store charges way too much?
and would be cheaper to buy it from a kid who swiped ram out of his parents mac and sold it for cheaper? (pm if interested).

decide forself : they asked me for 150euro. i got the chips for 42euro off the corner PC store.

Live can use 4GB, but Lion is very RAM hungry. Get extra memory from outside the Apple store, as recommended. If you have 8GB total you get half for Live. You'll be left with 2-3GB for Live on a 4GB system, depending on the amount of gear[1] and other processes. I like to keep enough programs running that I use about 4GB, a little over 3GB if I close Safari, so having 8GB has helped a lot. Those 8Dio collections can get large too :)

[1] Device drivers do eat a chunk of memory each. It could be a few hundred megabytes when you have two USB hubs worth of crap.

icanseeclearlynowtherainhasgone wrote:buy the 4 for now.
when my mom goes out for the afternoon today, im gonna break open her macbook and take one of the RAM sticks out and sell it. she will never know.

Has anyone ever told you that you are complete scum?

Get 8.

But yes apple charges a bit much. I'm not sure if they still give the option of either giving 2 X 2gb ram sticks or 1 x 4gb ram stick in the macbooks, but make sure you get a single 4gb ram stick so that you can just add another one.

it depends.
if you are the kind of person (usually secretaries at smaller companies) who leaves all the previously used applications open then 8 gb wont't be enough /or rendering in premiere in the background when using logic rewired to live in a set with huge sample libraries.
guess what i am still fine with 2gb on snow leo.
in short: 8gb.

Got 4GB. Later bought 8GB (2x4GB sticks) from Crucial. Can't say I noticed much difference. Maybe I'd notice a little if I took it out. Should make the biggest difference when 64-bit Live 9 comes out. I bought it as a last ditch attempt to try to get rid of audio glitches. They didn't go, but solved it later with a Crucial M4 256GB SSD! Even 7200rpm laptop drives just can't keep up with my writing process (which often involves lots of simultaneous tracks of junk).

Hmmm... I sound like a Crucial advert.... other memory and SSD vendors available! (but yeah, Apple is expensive for extra memory)

I wouldn't recommend anybody less than 6GB that is a heavy plugin user. That is how much I have. Currently live can utilize max. about 3GB (maybe even 4GB) but you will need a few gigabytes for OS too (at least in Win7, I don't know about OSX) to prevent swapping. Win7 will utilize the unused RAM as cache so it will speed up disk operations so no RAM is wasted. There must be same functionality in OSX.

Although Live will become unstable when RAM consuption grows over 1.5GB (in Win7 at least) so I usually try to clean it up regularly so that the consuption stays under. But supposedly and hopefully this will be corrected when Live9 is published.

Conclusion: buy 8GB because it is cheap. Then would won't need to update ever again, most likely.