Laptop Performance

[Freddy Bloggs]

I'm thinking of just using a laptop (MBP 2.3) as my main comp with the soon to arrive uad2SOLO/Laptop.

Using an external FW drive & an ultralite, how many tracks do you estimate i can run comfortably on a mix session with a 1024 buffer & a Neve 88RS on every channel & say 3 auxes- a reverb & a few misc aux sends (delays etc)?

Cheers!

[Armageddon]

I have a first-gen 2 GHz MacBook with 2 GBs of RAM, and as far as I can tell, the CPU issues I'm having (and they're not necessarily "issues", per se, just things maxing out CPU usage) seem to stem from using VIs, not mixing audio. I haven't really gotten to mix audio, yet, beyond bouncing VIs to disk and outputting to two tracks (at 24-bit/96 kHz on a TC Konnekt24D using a 1024 buffer), but I imagine you could go quite a ways on DP 6, especially with pre-rendering mode and your UAD setup. I haven't even gotten around to using the powered plugs on my interface, yet, but beyond 96 kHz, they're useless, and as much as I'm dying to do a mix at 192 kHz, it seems both the interface and my computer choke at that resolution.

[Freddy Bloggs]

Thanks- Guess it's not such a common setup.

Anyone else just using a laptop for mixing?

[timriley]

I use my laptop for recording and mixing.. Ive got a macbook-pro 2.16ghz intel core duo. Just over two years old now.

The best thing for me about using a laptop set-up and the reason I went fot this set-up myself, is for mobility. I can put my laptop, apogee duet, mic and a few other essentials into my rucksack and go anywhere i want that has a power supply/good monitoring/recording room treatment and expect excellent results with minimum fuss. If mobility isn't desirable for you then i'd suggest either getting an imac or paying a little more for a mac-pro.

It really depends on how much you're planning to do with your laptop.. Like someone said earlier, If you're using alot of VI's you might have some issues, depending on which VI's of course and how you use them. For audio only sessions, using up to 20 or 30 tracks i'd say you'll be fine.. I've never tried to exceed about 25 myself. Im sure it's possible to go beyond this but it all depends on how many effects you use and which effects you use.. I find i base alot of my decisions when purchasing and using effects plug-ins, not just on quality and price but on CPU consumption.. Adding DSP solutions like the UAD solo you mentioned will help of course... As long as they work as advertised!

The other thing to think about is the size of internal hard disk drive your lap-top comes with. Mine is only about 95gb so after taking into account the system and applications and other stuff i only have 40-50gb of free disk space on my computer. Once you hit 30gb things become noticably slower and seem less stable.. I guess streaming your audio from an external drive is an option.. I personally get a bit nervous about having my apogee duet and an external hard drive running from the same 400mb firewire port.. I tend to back things up and then delete them from my system instead.. The newer macbook-pros have much larger internal storage so this is less of an issue, perhaps.

Getting the most amount of RAM that your laptop can use will improve things further..

Mixing on a laptop does impose certain limitations. You have to act conservatively and really think about what you use and how you use it. If you can learn to work within the constraints, the possibilities are endless. There is no reason you can't achieve comparable results on a modern laptop that you can do on a modern desktop when mixing projects with a small or mid-sized track count (IMO).

[Freddy Bloggs]

Cheers timriley!

[timriley]

No problem Freddie Bloggs!