Laptop or desktop?

  • Thread starter Thread starter lyricist
  • Start date Start date

I use a....Laptop or desktop for recording..

  • Laptop

    Votes: 25 28.7%

  • Desktop

    Votes: 43 49.4%

  • Both!

    Votes: 19 21.8%
  • Total voters
    87
i only use laptops when i go out of country or state and work with a different ppl. other than that, i dun personally like laptops. i know some ppl who loves laptops, its just a personal choice. but i personally prefer desktops for studio, cuz laptops doesnt give u the look. lolz u know wat i mean??
 
i use my G4 powerbook right now. its nice to be portable. i can move my firepod into different rooms in the house and thats nice.

i'd love to have a G5 tower to mix on. it'd be really nice to have all the extra processor speed for plugins. but that will have to wait.
 
I've used both and it boils down to personal preference and i gotta go with the pc hands down no major difference or enhancement just personal preference...
 
Desktops are pheonominally easy to work on yourself if you wanna upgrade or fix something, but obviously laptops are more portable.
 
can someone tell me if my laptop will be able to record adequately? I know the CPU and everything is fine, but I'm not sure about the sound card (I don't know much about this stuff, how does the soundcard effect the recording capability?)

Dell Inspiron 9100
P4 3.0GHz
512MB RAM
SigmaTel C-Major Audio

the soundcard just came with the computer
 
Metalloid said:
can someone tell me if my laptop will be able to record adequately? I know the CPU and everything is fine, but I'm not sure about the sound card (I don't know much about this stuff, how does the soundcard effect the recording capability?)

Dell Inspiron 9100
P4 3.0GHz
512MB RAM
SigmaTel C-Major Audio

the soundcard just came with the computer
Click to expand...
Your laptop will work fine.

Your soundcard should record OK but it will be nasty.

If you want your recordings to sound decent, you'll need a proper firewire or usb2 external soundcard
 
For soundcard you defintely want to go the firewire route with a laptop, that the overwhelming consensus from the many views I've read on the laptop-external soundcard issue.
 
cawhite12 said:
My Laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8600. You might go for the Pentium M before you go with a Pentium 4. Do some research, the Pentium M outperforms the P4 on many tasks, including audio. That's what made me eventually go that route. Plus, the new Pentium M's (with the 533Mhz Bus) are even better. If you can wait another year, Intel will have the Dual Core Pentium M based Yonah's out. Those will probably kick fat ass.
Click to expand...



Not long after I made this thread i came to the conclusion that no matter what i will get a pentium M centrino 740 or higher.

this is equivilent to a pentium 4 2.8+.

i did my research lol..and pentium 4's basically aren't good for laptops. theyre good... But they are moreso a desktop chip. pentium Ms are better for laptops esp with centrino technology.

Now im still looking at what i want to get. i recently discovered "fujitsu" brand notebooks and they seem to be pretty killers. ive been searching this site trying to find out if anyone uses them but can't really tell.
 
i've been using a laptop exclusively for over a year now. my old DAW is now a web app server.

i use firewire to a tascam fw-1884 in the studio room, and a edirol fa-101 when i'm out.
 
So, what brand of laptop are you guys finding works good for recording?

I heard the sony vaios suck. admittedly, i was interested in them because of their look. But not going to get one.

The fujitsu laptops look solid. Also the model im looking into has an external monitor port so I could hook up a fairly larged screen lcd and do recording on that view. :cool:
 
well i just got an ibook g4 with the ram up to 768mb (is that the number). I was hoping to make the most out of the network at home to save data directly across it but it wasent able to save onto a dos based HD quick enough. Anyway, it is coping brilliantly. There is a noticable performance drop in comparison to my old system which was a dual processor dell (amazing for recording it was). But the mac still runs well.
 
Gotta go with both, even though at the moment I only have a laptop. Desktops just seems to be a lot better and have a TON more options. I'm not going to lie though, my laptop is pretty sweet except for not having a Firewire slot, (which is where I'd like to hook up an interface). It is a HP with a mobile AMD Athlon XP2800+, 60GB HD, and 512MB RAM (even though 64MB of it automatically goes to the friggin video card I don't even need. I gotta change that) Once I get a Firewire slot via PCMCIA, this puppy should be a sweet portable little studio.
 
One thing that no one has mentioned is making a portable desktop. There are plenty of 4 space rackmount cases out there and coupled with a pullout server type LCD and a shockmount case, you can have a large briefcase size desktop that would not be too bad to lug around and you could put anything you want in there (mmmm dual opteron for the road)

Pull out monitor
 
Laptop Toshiba P25 series

Pentium4 3 Ghz, 1.25G Ram, Internal 80G 5400RPM, External 120G 7200RPM HD on USB, with a MOTU 828MKII on Firewire. I haven't been able to throw anything at it that it can't handle as of yet. Tracking, mixing, its fine with everything. Running Sonar3 and mostly Waves plugins. I did alot of research before I found the laptop with exact specs I wanted.

Celerons in laptops suck for recording...or anything else for that matter. I bought my gf a new laptop with a Celeron and even after a 1G ram upgrade, its still a dog.

Oh yeah, I also use my laptop for everything else and it runs things like Half Life2 just fine also.

H2H
 
Looking to invest around 2000/2500 euro (2500/3000 dollars i suppose) on a laptop for audio recording at some stage in the next year or so.

All i've got at the moment is a P4 2.66GHZ, 1GB DDR RAM, 5400RPM 80 GB hard drive and a fairly crappy motherboard amongst other things not worth mentioning. It would probably be a bit faster if it wasnt used for other things aswell as recording but what can ya do :rolleyes: .

Also thinking about putting together my own PC in the region of 6000 euro (For Recording, PC Games, Missile Control Centre :D) which would take a good year or so of saving but im not patient enough so coughing up enough dough for a high end laptop in the short/medium term looks like the priority.

This is the one i thinking of going for....

http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/page/shop/flypage/product_id/7019
 
Bigger = better

You can't record music on laptop. Everybody knows that.

Bigger is better. So don't buy a laptop. Unless of course it's red. Red laptops kick ass.
 
Last edited:
Toddskins said:
You can't record music on laptop. Everybody knows that.

Bigger is better. So don't buy a laptop. Unless of course it's red. Red laptops kick ass.
Click to expand...

I agree to an extent...

Most laptops suck for recording beside some of the newer dual core ones (less then a year or two old).

I've owned 4 laptops in the past 2 years all running M series 1.4-2.0 (the 2.0 was a pin modified Centrino 1.4). All of them were running 2gigs of memory, reg modified, and all but one of them had a 5400rpm HD (4200 for the other). and a Firepod for input.

The Celeron 1.4 couldn't record more then 4-5 tracks (depended on if it was on a cool mat) without clipping. All the others could record 8 tracks but one would clip when the computer started to get a little warm... none of them could record surround through a stereo encoder and lagged a little with one or two tracks in 5.1 mix.

Laptops are a lot slower then desktops; a single core laptop running 1.5 is 25-50% slower then a desktop running a 1.5 single core... Same goes for dual core... Most of that has to do with the fact that all laptop CPUs use a lot less power to run. It allows them to stay at an optimal temperature if they consumed the same power as your desktop they would over heat and waste your battery in about an hour... The other reason laptops are slower is because they all have to share resources...

If you like laptops for recording then go with a dual core 1.4 or better and of course 2gigs or better of ram... and preferably 5400 or better HD...
 
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