Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Buying a Laptop to make music

Have spoken to someone at Digital Villiage - gonna go over and check them out when the get some more stock in...

They seem like the kinda people who can give some proper ins-tore advice.

For soundcard stuff - reckon i'll only record things one at a time. If at all.

As much as a desktop would be better and fuller and stuff - it'll be way too much of a bugger to lug around if i ever get round to do stuff live...

Erm... What exactly is a sequencer? And why do i need one? (told you i know nothing...)


Please anyone feel free to input more of you knowledge on me...
 
Am not exactly good at putting technical stuff into words. but a sequencer is basically the main 'hub' of your recording system; to put it REALLY simply its where you arrange/edit/program/mixetc your track. For example, below is a shot of Reason's (fairly basic) sequencer:

sequencer.jpg


Or Cubase SX:

cubase.jpg


It gets a lot more technical, but that's essentially the jist of it.
 
akirajoel said:
Intel Celeron M 360 Processor 1.40 GHz
400 MHz FSB
1 Mb Cache
256 Mb RAM
50 Gb Hard Drive
DVD ReWriter + R9 Drives
15" LCD Display
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
64 Mb Shared Graphics
1 Year FREE Warranty

Is that not enough?

Why are Celerons so shite?
Click to expand...


I wouldn't get that for anything, let alone music. Barely has enough RAM for general tasks on XP. Processor's way out of date and the HD's too small.
 
heinous seamus said:
Hello old thread. I am about to buy a laptop and I thought I might try to make some music with it.

http://www.acerdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_4920_Gemstone_Laptop_LX.AKW0X.114/version.asp

Would this be any good? It has 2mb ram and a 250 gb hard drive. I'm not that sure what else I need, to be honest...
Click to expand...


Well, seems alright to me. Someone else may know more. I'd be a little concerned about the HD speed. 5400 RPM, if you're going to be recording a lot of audio tracks at once. Also, you'll need an external soundcard / MIDI port. Which depends on what you want to do. i.e. use MIDI, softsynths or record multi track audio at once. The general spec seems good. Switch of all the fancy crap in Vista to squeeze more out of it.
 
heinous seamus said:
Hello old thread. I am about to buy a laptop and I thought I might try to make some music with it.

http://www.acerdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_4920_Gemstone_Laptop_LX.AKW0X.114/version.asp

Would this be any good? It has 2mb ram and a 250 gb hard drive. I'm not that sure what else I need, to be honest...
Click to expand...


How into music production are you? If you just want to mess about in Reason, that'll cope nicely.

For proper music production, you'll most likely need to uninstall Vista completely, and go for Windows XP, and you'll need a proper audio interface.
 
akirajoel said:
Intel Celeron M 360 Processor 1.40 GHz
400 MHz FSB
1 Mb Cache
256 Mb RAM
50 Gb Hard Drive
DVD ReWriter + R9 Drives
15" LCD Display
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
64 Mb Shared Graphics
1 Year FREE Warranty

Is that not enough?

Why are Celerons so shite?
Click to expand...

Abosolute crap for making music, sorry. :)
 
heinous seamus said:
Hello old thread. I am about to buy a laptop and I thought I might try to make some music with it.

http://www.acerdirect.co.uk/Acer_Aspire_4920_Gemstone_Laptop_LX.AKW0X.114/version.asp

Would this be any good? It has 2mb ram and a 250 gb hard drive. I'm not that sure what else I need, to be honest...
Click to expand...
I was going to buy this more expensive model from the same supplier (price £529). I've since found and ordered the same from here for £449 - the same price as the one you're looking at. The specs are v. similar but I think my one (I get it Wednesday :cool:) has a slightly better graphics card. Both of the graphics cards are a bit rubbish actually - buty I shopped around a hell of a lot before making my choice and if anyone can find me a better laptop for the price... well, I'll be very, very annoyed of course. (But yeah, I challenge you all..). The reviews for the 5920g are universally excellent. Get that one instead.

(P.S. It's available on 9 months interest-free credit - buy now, pay in May 2009. :cool:)
 
Xanadu said:
Mainly better driver support, but it's also easiest to remove the crap that slows your system down.
Click to expand...

Various tips out there to tweak vista for music making. It's only 'easier' when you know how to. :)

I read somewhere that XP doesn't appear to have a long shelf life. I would check if the audio interface has vista drivers developed for it, before taking the drastic step of uninstalling and installing an operating system.

The other option, as I did, was to have a duel-boot system, with both vista and xp on different partitions on the hard drive. Then, having one music dedicated start-up.

Although, once I had hold of new drivers for vista, I deleted the xp partition and now just have vista as the operating system on the machine.
 
It all depends on the type of music production you'll be doing (among many many other factors, such as portability). What sort of hardware do you have/will you be using? Are you going to be just using Reason, or will you be recording audio from lots of different sources and mixing together dozens of tracks?

If you're just using Reason, possibly while playing back a couple of additional audio tracks, you should be fine with that. If you're going to be doing more, (like recording/layering lots and lots of audio tracks), you may wish to get a faster 7200rpm hard drive. Someone will come along and suggest a Mac - maybe that's a better option for you, but I'll leave that up to others to debate.

e2a: I prefer smaller hi-res screens, because of portability (and battery) - personal preference that is...
 
Ask if the Laptop has Firewire.

If it does it will be useful, you can use USB these days but the items are much rarer and you are stuck with just a few models to choose from, as compared to Firewire which seems to be the industry standard for plug in modules.

By this I mean, if you ever need to plug any sort of interface into your Laptop you will likely find it will be Firewire.

Saying that, any Laptop that has Firewire will also have USB. So you still got all the choices.
 
Dravinian said:
Ask if the Laptop has Firewire.

If it does it will be useful, you can use USB these days but the items are much rarer and you are stuck with just a few models to choose from, as compared to Firewire which seems to be the industry standard for plug in modules.

By this I mean, if you ever need to plug any sort of interface into your Laptop you will likely find it will be Firewire.

Saying that, any Laptop that has Firewire will also have USB. So you still got all the choices.
Click to expand...

USB2 is by far more common in studio equipment nowadays, firewire has been used in new products less and less it seems.
 
Moggy said:
USB2 is by far more common in studio equipment nowadays, firewire has been used in new products less and less it seems.
Click to expand...

I dunno about that, I was reading a review for the UA101 on another thread and the article did state that there hadn't been a USB item like it for awhile and that Firewire was still the standard.

Perhaps the article meant just for that style of Audio Interface, but I read it as it meant a wider a field.
 
Hmm so how important is the firewire port? What are they used for?
I have a USB keyboard.

I found a nicelaptop but no firewire port. Is it easy/cheap to get one for your laptop?
 
heinous seamus said:
Hmm so how important is the firewire port? What are they used for?
I have a USB keyboard.

I found a nicelaptop but no firewire port. Is it easy/cheap to get one for your laptop?
Click to expand...

As far as I know - getting a Firewire port added to your machine is dodgy and expensive.

Really, you won't need a Firewire for audio production, though you will if you want to mess about with video capture from a camcorder, or if you want to connect a fast drive for video or added mega-sound libraries (60GB or more).

Firewire is a swifter exchange speed than USB2.

So... it depends on your needs.
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
If you want to use a firewire audio interface they're rather important :D

Make sure it's a Texas Instruments chipset, as others can cause the odd problem with various interfaces.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but you don't have to go for a Firewire i/face... the USB jobbies are perfectly adequate for the beginner.
 
beesonthewhatnow said:
And the pro!

For all but the most specialised of use, firewire and USB2 are identical.
Click to expand...

As you know I need video systems to hook up to computers - not one of them uses USB2, which leads me to believe the Firewire system is far quicker.

I dunno actually - let me check...

Wiki said:
Although high-speed USB 2.0 nominally runs at a higher signaling rate (480 Mbit/s) than FireWire 400, typical USB PC-hosts rarely exceed sustained transfers of 280 Mbit/s, with 240 Mbit/s being more typical.

This is likely due to USB's reliance on the host-processor to manage low-level USB protocol, whereas FireWire delegates the same tasks to the interface hardware.

For example, the FireWire host interface supports memory-mapped devices, which allows high-level protocols to run without loading the host CPU with interrupts and buffer-copy operations.

FireWire 800 is substantially faster than Hi-Speed USB.
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireWire#Comparison_to_USB

Well well, I never knew USB2 was quicker than Firewire 400...!

Learn something every day innit... though all my drives are on a Firewire 800 chain so it doesn't affect me really.
 
Your problem is that you get too focused on the mac vs. PC debate, rather than concentrating on what's the best tool for the job :p ;) :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Humberto
Irish music with a republican theme
2 3
Replies
70
Views
1K
Balmaha
Balmaha
ska invita
60s + 70s music videos, from the age before MTV
2 3 4
Replies
115
Views
3K
blossie33
blossie33
Cloo
Things or people that make you think of songs
2
Replies
49
Views
1K
Elpenor
Elpenor
U
What exactly is 'music' and why does nobody ever seem to ask that question?
2
Replies
46
Views
1K
mojo pixy
mojo pixy
A
How men in music exclude women
2
Replies
35
Views
1K
ElizabethofYork
ElizabethofYork
Back
Top Bottom