Hi folks,

I want to buy a laptop totally dedicated for music/sound production. I've always been a PC user, so I'm not familiar at all with Mac, and I do know that lots of people prefer mac when it comes to music production.

I heard that my biggest concern should be RAM mainly, and certainly I can get double ram in pc by half of the price of mac. I intend to use it with Pure Data, Ableton Live, Reason, Cubase and VST plug-ins. I also intend to use it live so I really want something that doesn't fuck with my patience.

In the other hand, I've been also considering using Linux, because I'm getting really interested in the concept of free software and I think it would be some kind of action using it. But I'm scared as hell, used Linux in college and always seemed too geeky for me. Besides, lots of programs that I intend to use are not available and the gnu side options don't really convince me.

Anyway, I know this discussion is an endless one, but I would really appreciate some feedback here. I've been researching and I've seen HP laptops that really kick ass in specs to Mac Book Pro and it costs 1000$ less.

Thanks for your advices,

caco

Well, don't buy your mac ram from the apple store. get it from crucial.com instead

RAM is good, but it's not the be all and end all of computing (as trend will tell you it is)

Will you trust second hand?

I am not going to tell you which of the Mac, PC, Linux trinity is actually holiest.

Which specs should I care of? Just saw a 15`` MacBook pro, 4GB RAM for 1300$ (apple store 2500$), claimed to be never opened on craiglist. Do you guys think 4GB are enough or maybe should I try to really consider 6GB or even 8GB. In that case, it would be PC.

Thanks!

Maybe that's not really what you're looking for for an answer but:
http://puredata.hurleur.com/sujet-1755-hardware-run

In my very humble opinion, 4Gb of RAM is far enough (i mean for a mac), but i'm no expert.

i am on just a lowly macbook 10.4.11 with 2g or ram and 1.83ghz core duo
and it suites my needs for ableton and pure data i usually have them running at the same time and it works great
honestly my suggestion as i used PCs my whole life up until a couple years ago (not that i don't have parallels up and goig with a copy of XP) but with my using macs i have not had nearly as much in that way of reseting for no reason and generally testing your patience

and since apple just updated the original white macbooks specs to pretty much cover the new macbooks without some of the flash i would say at 999 the white macbooks are great up to 4g of ram (albeit its not DDR3 but still)
i have been halfway considering selling my old one and getting a new one or just scraping that whole plan and getting a used 17' imac which can be found pretty cheap under 700 if you look around

3 years ago, i've bought myself a dedicated music dell laptop with winxp. Never regretted it sofar. I can do wathever i want on it (cubase, all vsts, flstudio and last but not least pd).

Installed ubuntu studio a couple weeks ago (dual boot) just to give it a try, but then i quickly realized that i would have to re-learn everything i could do on win again in linux, which would cost me a lot of time if can't invest right now. Maybe someday later i'll do the switch but for now it's good old win for me.

D.

_____ edit :

I've seen people doing good performances with macbooks, laptops running linux and netbooks running win...

So, unless you have enough time to spend to learn new things, i'd suggest going for something you're comfortable with (no matter which platform that may be)...

Good luck with your search.

I used to think i needed loads of ram and a super fast processor.
But the truth is, for most stuff i do, my g3 ibook can handle it fine.

And i haven't had many problems with the limited stuff i've done on my eee.

maybe i'm just not patching hard enough?

... or you're just patching "too efficiently"

rocking 256mb of ram here

I've done great with 768mb of ram. I'm using puredyne right now, and I always wish I had a faster processor is the main thing. single 2.0ghz intel inside. Wutev. I'm just inefficient with my cycles. if I could perform a petaflop it wouldn't be enough for me.

@sunji said:

petaflop

didn't that get banned from airing during the superbowl

You do know that accessing the disk while computing audio causes the audio engine to halt for a couple of 100ms? This is really annoying if you're planning to do long uninterupted performances with lots of samples.

In that case i guess much ram is a wise decision - indeed maybe more imporant than cpu. i can do nearly everything i want on a pentium iv 1.7 (which was a super-machine 8 years ago) in terms of cpu (including streaming 5 stereo channels to disk using writesf~ objects).

I'm not much of a disk accessor. I hardly even use arrays. I do a lot of signal chains and fft and what not.