New Laptop

  • Thread starter Thread starter Noble3
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Noble3

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Ok, so I am new to this and am going to get a new (used) laptop to do some home recording (nothing professional, but a small quality set up). I am only recording vocals and keyboard.

Do you think this is a good laptop?

Up for sale is an iBook G4 14" white laptop. The computer comes with 512 mb of ram (upgradable to 1.5 GB) and a 1.42 GHZ PowerPC G4. Laptop comes with a 60 gb hard drive and super drive (DVD-R and CD-R) and built in airport card and bluetooth. Laptop also has a new battery and works great. Will come with a fresh install of Apple's OS X Leopard.

Not sure about Apple, never have had 1. But the price on this seemed reasonable, but i just wasn't sure if this would be fast enough/have enough memory. Any insight?
 
Ive never used on either. But I was looking at iBook G4 with Mac OS X Version 10.4.11, 1.07 GHz PowerPC G4, 1.25 GB DDR SDRAM (Can get it for a decent price)

Not sure if this would be a good choice for a small home studio.

Any thoughts?
 
Ok well, since NOBODY answered, I went ahead and bought a MAC.

Anyways, I am looking to go mixerless and just use software, so I am starting to look at firewire interfaces. Any suggestions for recording everything at once?

As in, I don't want to record each music piece seperate, vocals seperate, etc. I want to be able to record them at once. I will only have 1 or 2 instruments and vocals.

Which interface would be useful?
 
please tell me you didn't get that mac with 512 g of ram. i don't think you're gona get far. i have a macbook pro with 2 gigs of ram and every once in a while i have to close every program other than my DAW or it will get errors.

what instruments are you using? guitars, vox and bass?
 
You already bought the computer but...

I record 2 channels at a time on a Pentium 4, 512RAM computer. Tho after several tracks with effects, I'm pushing about 40% processing power (so sayeth Sonar 7).

Just remember, since it's just you and you just want to do a vocal and keyboard, save some money and go with a small USB audio interace. Pan full left and right to get 2 isolated mono tracks.
 
When it comes to DAWs and recording the simple rule has to be throw as much horsepower at it as you possibly can. I have 3 recording setups: a desktop iMac core2Duo 2ghz for the main recording functions; a dual core 2ghz Windows 7 17" laptop as my portable rig and finally an 867mhz Powerbook G4 for song sketching while I'm out and about.
Your order of priority for a laptop or desktop ought to be
CPU speed (and number of cores)
RAM
HDD speed
Connectivity options (firewire/usb/thunderbird)

Modern DAWs are quite processor intensive, especially when you start adding plugins (consider buses to reduce plugin instances).
That said, although the 1.42Ghz G4 is an old machine by modern standards, Mac OS X's Core Audio architecture has the edge over Windows for audio performance, though the gap has narrowed massively in recent years thanks to Asio among others.
For your interface I would make use of the Firewire port on the iBook - firewire offers better continuous speed than usb 2.0. Take a look at the Focusrite Saffire range, very well made and very happy with OS X. I would also put a shout out for the TC electronic Desktop Konnekt 6, one of which I used for nearly two years - a simple and effective, very high quality firewire interface.

Oh, and this is my first post. My name's Paddy, I've been writing and recording for about 6 years, based in the UK and a real indie kid at heart.

Cheers
 
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