Need to buy a Laptop for music. Suggest a model #?

[headhunter]

Travelling on the job and a lot of time spent in hotel rooms makes this the inevitable choice. I'm still undecided on PC or MAC ( i have no experience whatsoever on the latter.)

I will be using the usual Cubase/Logic/Ableton Live! sequencers and REASON and VST plug ins. Another thing is i have 13 hardwaresynths that i wish to record (altho not simultaneously!) and some vocals so if you can suggest a soundcard that has MIDI and at least one preamp that would be good.

Any help at all is greatly appreciated!

 

[veganbleu]

m-audio Firewire 410???? If you can wait, behringer's got a new soundcard lined up. It's USB 2 !

 

[soft]

I dont know which laptop to buy but I did used a Compaq Presario 1.8Ghz, 512Mb ram, 30Gb HD and running on XP. Was only recording stereo with SoundForge. No problem but there something about the HardDrive, it is making all these sound as if it was being tortured! :lol:

 

[Cheez]

Whatever laptop, just make sure that it has lots of RAM for your VSTi and plug-ins. Firwire is still faster than USB 2.0 in real life although USB 2.0 is supposed to have transfer rate of 480Mbps while Firewire is 400Mbps. Firewire also taxes less CPU than USB. I'm not sure whether the 800Mbps recording hardware are out yet.

My only problem with firewire is that laptops only have one jack. If you're doing recording or sample streaming, it is always good to have an external firewire harddrive - but then that means that you can't use firewire soundboxes. So I guess that may leave us to the PCMCIA options like Echo's Indigo (no midi)/Layla or RME. Anybody knows the comparison for latencies between PCMCIA and firewire/ USB 2.0?

 

[stalefish]

Powerbook G5 with a Motu828MKII would be good if you don't need more then one midi input at a time.

 

[headhunter]

Wow, i just checked out some lappys and there's a LOT of choice out there! One of the things i noticed was the graphics card makes a lot of difference to the price. Is it necessary for a music laptop to have ATI RADEON 9800 PRO and be $400 more than the same one with a 'shared' graphics card?

 

[montereyb]

hi,

shared graphics means that your graphics card shares the same memory with your applications. for example, if the laptop has 512mb ram, and your graphic card uses 64mb, that leaves you with 448mb for the rest of your applications.

as it was mentioned that these music applications uses a lot of memory, you may compromise your actual application speed.

btw, im using a dell 2.0g 512mb, 30g hdd, 15.4" lcd, serial/parallel/firewire/usb2.0 port, using sigmatel soundcard. i recently downloaded the cakewalk pro audio software and tried to playback a midi, but doesn't work. can someone help me on this?

:?

 

[lowjk]

>>btw, im using a dell 2.0g 512mb, 30g hdd, 15.4" lcd, serial/parallel/firewire/usb2.0 port, using sigmatel soundcard. i recently downloaded the cakewalk pro audio software and tried to playback a midi, but doesn't work. can someone help me on this?

1) Did you set up the midi connections (in software correctly)
2) Did you connect the external synths correctly? (as far as I know, CW9.0 is not able to use software synths).

* I am working on the assumption that you are aware that Midi files do not contain audio data.

 

[headhunter]

hi,

shared graphics means that your graphics card shares the same memory with your applications. for example, if the laptop has 512mb ram, and your graphic card uses 64mb, that leaves you with 448mb for the rest of your applications.

as it was mentioned that these music applications uses a lot of memory, you may compromise your actual application speed.

Thanks, that made a lot of sense. I guess a workaround would be to buy more RAM? Of course having a top of the line graphics card would be ideal but to save cost, i want to know if a typical music laptop needs to have a great graphic card? Is it graphics intensive like a gaming laptop? Is 64MB enuf or 128MB for a graphics card?