Laptop/Desktop

specs

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Hi, I'm thinking of purchasing a used laptop for mastering my tracks. Currently I have a desktop Pc: Pentium II Celeron 300, 64MB, with a 4Gb hardrive(not sure of the rpms) and a Cdr drive. I'm thinking of doing all my mixing and multitracking recording outside of the comp so as not to need ram or get comp noise. I have a factory Yamaha soundcard and I was wondering if I purchase a laptop is the factory soundcard good enough? Also I will be using FruityLoops 3 to do some beats on the comp after transporting the live audio into the comp. Is it ok to just purchase a use laptop and use that or should I stick with my comp and upgrade were necessary. Convenience is also an issue.
 
i dont get the part about not needing ram on a laptop?.....are u wanting to put the Yamaha soundcard in the laptop?......

anyway, stick with the computer......
 
The built in sound capability in virtually ALL laptops is pretty miserable. Good enough for games (although some would argue that) but definately not something to do serious recording with.

There are some external USB recording interfaces, one of those with a laptop might be pretty cool, but the speed limit of USB means you probably couldn't record too many tracks at once.
 
I've seen cool things happen with Macintosh laptops, though. It might be worthwhile to consider a Mac if you want to record with a laptop - though I've no personal experience with one.
 
Don't have any "specs" for the laptop. My thoughts were to purchase a used Mac laptop and find the easiest way to hook it up. The only thing I want to use the laptop for is mastering and final transfer to Cdr. I wanted to leave a PC for the rest of the family to use. But if the Laptop is to expensive and needs exstensive upgrades then I would stick to the PC. I'm not sure if you need that much memory and speed for final mastering and recording to CDR. I want to do all pre-mixing outside of comp to save from the crashing thing. Celerons aren't exactly Full Pentiums, apparently something was removed from the cpu to make it more affordable.

Another reason why I'm considering a laptop is for transportation. Say a band has a better place to practice than mine, I would like to transport the comp with some ease.

quote:

i dont get the part about not needing ram on a laptop?.....are u wanting to put the Yamaha soundcard in the laptop?......


I assume I wouldn't need more ram if I only intend to master with the comp.
No I would use the Yamaha at all.

Thanks
Specs
 
Specs - As a general rule, you're always going to get less for your money with a laptop. $1000 would get you a pretty good laptop; or it would get you an awesome desktop.

But you're probably going to have to upgrade either way. If you're running Windows '95, you will most likely need to upgrade to Windows '98, at least. And 64MB of RAM is really stretching it - a 256MB stick of PC133 SDRAM will cost you $35. Thats an easy upgrade that should bring a speed boost.

Now if I'm remembering correctly, the Celeron 300 came in two versions - with and without L2 cache. If you have the one without L2 cache, I really doubt that it's going to be fast enough for any recording applications. If it has L2 cache, it's highly overclockable, and you might be able to get it to run at over 450mhz - but then, new CPUs are so cheap, it almost isn't worth the effort and risk. And if you did that, you'd have to upgrade the RAM, because you're most likely using PC66...

Finally, the hard drive. It's probably 4500RPM. I would think about upgrading, even just to a 5400RPM drive - when I first got into recording, I had a slow dinky 3GB drive. It worked okay. I could only work with about 6-8 tracks at a time, though. Somewhere along the line, an acquaintance gave me his 5400RPM 8GB hard drive. I figured anything would be an improvement over what I had, but I was surprised at just how much of an improvement it was - the new drive was over twice as fast as the old one, in benchmarks.

I would say that you should try some audio stuff with your computer before making a decision. If all you want to do is master with it, you might just need some extra RAM, and that's it; but if you decide against buying a laptop and want to use your desktop for recording, you may want to consider putting together a new desktop or upgrading the one you have.
 
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