Ableton Forum

Seriously considering Live and taking my tunes to the outside world.

Can anyone please tell me what laptop or laptop specs they are using? I don't want to spend anymore than I have to. All experiences much appreciated.

Thanks

Avon

Using this system I get 10ms of latency using the DirectX Full duplex driver. Note: this is only for output because I guess the onboard doesn't support directx full duplex input. But it seems to work great with the demo of live and in reason.

-Jared

Thank you Jared.

To clarify, I'm only looking at the laptop for playback of loops already recorded.

Any more?

I currently run a Fujitsu Amilo D running windows XP with an Edirol UA-20 audio/midi interface, everything runs stably with a latency of 8ms.

The one thing I found when looking at laptops was that a lot share system ram for the video card, which would cause a serious performance hit, especially for audio work. Go for a video chipset with its own ram.

Amilo D spec
P4 2.4g
768 Mb of ram
20 Gb hard disk (too small really)
ATI radeon 9000 64Mb graphics chipset

Comfortably runs 8 tracks with ~35 plug ins (several ohm force ones which a cpu heavy)

IanV

I heard other talking about this as well. Am not sure how it works on my Sony, maybe I can find out about it. Everything seems to run very fine am I thought that the Sony is not needing extra system Ram.

It all depends on your price range. But you should be able to get by with very little if its a PC you are after.

I have had great sucess runing Live on my very outdated laptop.
P3 800
192mb 133mhz sdram

running win2k with it only loading the services nessesary to use live. (thats about 4 of the 20+ that are started by default) i have only about 5 processes running including Live.

all samples are stored on their own partition.
and i think i did some registry tweeks... i can remember.

i am running 9 tracks and 5fx at full performance and stable.
oh yeah.. and currently useing the crap built in sound card. but thats soon to change.


anyway... my point is that you can run Live on almost any new PC Laptop that you can buy even i its $500. anything new is at least going to be 1.5 times as good as what i am running now.

it took me a long time to find the right laptop until i saw the computermusic guide to laptop you will know everything you need.
http://www.computermusic.co.uk/tutorial ... aptop1.asp

Earlier in this thread Gruff mentioned paring his machine down to the bare essentials in terms of services. I checked, I notice I've got a ton running - does anyboody know if turning off as much as possible does in fact give you better performance, and if so, what *are* the minimum services to run?
thanks,
Brian

what *are* the minimum services to run

The following site will give some very helpful indications:

http://www.blackviper.com/Articles/OS/OSguides.htm

Turn them off according to this site's reccomendation. If nothing you care about is affected, leave them off.

Good luck,

e.

It depends on your needs - small and lightweight or a big-screen über-desktop-replacement?

In any case, get one with Firewire. The day will come when you want to use an external hard drive or a multichannel audio card.

i just picked up an eMachines M5310 a couple weeks ago.
$1200 us, with $150 mail in rebate.

athlon 2400+
512 mb ddr ram
40 gig hd
dvd/cdrw combo
built in wireless lan
3x usb 2.0
1x firewire

it is running really stable so far for me. it's pretty lightweight and has a great look and feel to it. plus it has a really nice widescreen display, so i can see up to 16 tracks simultaneously without having to scroll over.

if you want to seriously test your system. Windows200/xp offers a Performance tool (under Adminstrative Tools -> Performance). You can start logging memory, cpu and disk usage and lots of other things. it creates a log file which you can analyse using the same tool. this is heavy stuff but when you start disabling service this might be handy.

my tip? leave the services alone, most will only start when they are really needed.

Or you could buy a Mac and it would just work...

-Alex