I'm SERIOUSLY considering

[Bonteburg]

Getting a cheap Aldi lappie and FL Studio once I have a little money tucked away, any tips/opinions?

I don't need a fancy recording setup or indeed ANY recording setup (ie soundcard with a gazillion inputs etc) as I'll basically use it as a Groove-Box....

as anyone gone this route? How cheap can a PC laptop get and still be good (I'm coming from a Mac angle so I haven't got a clue really)

Marco




edit: changed "god" to "good", let's keep it down-to-earth!

[Muff Wiggler]

you should try that sequencer/host thing called 'Girl'

[soulkraka]

I don't need a fancy recording setup or indeed ANY recording setup (ie soundcard with a gazillion inputs etc) as I'll basically use it as a Groove-Box....

you'll notice a huge improvement in sound quality if you pick up a cheap PCMIA ASIO soundcard, such as an ECHO Indigo.

[Spe3D]

Trouble with cheap laptops is the hard drives - often they come with 4200 rpm drives (this is seriously slow) also the internal sound will be crap without a doubt, noise from every component in it will be evident – external usb sound card will resolve that – but my advice is – whatever cheap laptop you get – make sure you get one with a fast rpm drive.

If its for FL Studio – get a laptop with an AMD chip

Best regards,

Spe3d

:O)

[dougsyo]

If you get one with too slow a processor, or one with a Celeron processor (non-SSE, which rules out Wusikstation, ZeroVector and Synthmaker), or too few USB 2 high-speed ports, you are going to limit yourself, but this might not be a problem. Spend accordingly.

On the other hand, you can work around some problems of some laptops, if they arise for you down the road:

- USB 2.0 external housing with desktop-type hard drive inside for recording and/or large sample sets.
- USB or FireWire external audio/MIDI interface.
- add memory as budget allows, 512M may not be enough.

My system:
- Sony Vaio FS660 with 1GB RAM, 1.7Ghz Centrino, and 80GB of hard drive space. Price was US$1899 plus tax.
- The internal soundcard is better than most laptop systems, adequate with WDM or ASIO4All provided I don't overdrive the processor. I also have a Presonus Firebox.
- I have the external hard drive for large sample sets (Kontakt2, Kompakt, Dimension, ST2XL, Sonic Synth 1, Wusik and variants) but the synths stay on the internal hard drive.
- I mostly use Sonar 5P and FLStudio, although the latter is in transition to P5V2 as I get time to dink with it. I also have MiniHost, EnergyXT, and Brainspawn Forte.

Doug

[arke]

I've got a Medion laptop (so yes, from Aldi), and it works fine. 1.7ghz, 512mb ram, and an AC'97 which gets pretty good latency with ASIO4ALL (remember, the AC97 is what A4A was originally written for). Works fine, especially with my Oxygen8. My new favorite thing to when I go on long trips is take laptop and Oxygen8 with me (BT style!).

[Bonteburg]

hmmm...yeah...*nod*...well thanks for the advice!
This seems to be more complicated a process than I thought but it's only a plan for now...keep them coming!

Marco

[Amberience]

What sort of performance do you get Arke? How many Ambience instances can you run for example?

[Jeremy_NSL]

If you get one with too slow a processor, or one with a Celeron processor (non-SSE, which rules out Wusikstation, ZeroVector and Synthmaker)

Are you sure about that? I'm pretty sure all Intel CPUs sold for the last few years are SSE-capable...

Anyway, I'd get a Centrino laptop. AMD is great on the desktop, but their laptop stuff is pretty power-hungry.

[arke]

ITs a Centrino too, and has a good graphics card too for games

I can run every single Demo song in every single host just fine (including the Kier one in FL which just eats up my other friend's 1.6ghz celeron computer). I could probably run like 50 instances of Tarnce VST 2.0 Professional