Talk to me about switching to Mac...and still running XP

[debra1rlo]

don't you dare put down one of the greatest

what's next........dishing Rodney Dangerfield?.........

I can't figure out if you are defending Don Rickles... oops errrrr sorry...

I mean...

I can't figure out if you are defending Don Rickles or BONES but in no way was anything I posted was a put down. I love both (and Rodney Dangerfield for that matter) and I am waiting with baited breath for any of them to continue posting... please

[joshhunsaker]

i think we should just be glad that the era of midi tracking hardware has come to an end. Steve jobs is a pretty brilliant guy though. I mean, you take revolutions like the apple II, imac, ipod, itunes, now the iphone... that's a pretty dang good streak. People go hysterical each time he holds a new press conference.

[Adambomb337]

Has anyone bought a mac and only used windows on it?

[hibidy]

don't you dare put down one of the greatest

what's next........dishing Rodney Dangerfield?.........

I can't figure out if you are defending Don Rickles... oops errrrr sorry...

I mean...

I can't figure out if you are defending Don Rickles or BONES but in no way was anything I posted was a put down. I love both (and Rodney Dangerfield for that matter) and I am waiting with baited breath for any of them to continue posting... please

Hey, I had a little "hihi" by mine too (will two provide the "all good")?

[hibidy]

Has anyone bought a mac and only used windows on it?

Yes, windows runs fine.........but sadly, my imac sucks and need to be put in a museum or fixed..........

Hmmmmmm, I have one and a half year left of warranty.......I'm going to keep complaining till it's fixed.........

[neptunefix]

How are the drivers for the built in soundcard on the macbook (non pro)?

[debra1rlo]

don't you dare put down one of the greatest

what's next........dishing Rodney Dangerfield?.........

I can't figure out if you are defending Don Rickles... oops errrrr sorry...

I mean...

I can't figure out if you are defending Don Rickles or BONES but in no way was anything I posted was a put down. I love both (and Rodney Dangerfield for that matter) and I am waiting with baited breath for any of them to continue posting... please

Hey, I had a little "hihi" by mine too (will two provide the "all good")?

Oh Hibidy, it's always "all good" between us

Yeah, I knew you were kidding around, Hibidy ... I mostly just wanted to give the thread a little bump in hopes of catching BONES attention

[hibidy]

don't you dare put down one of the greatest

what's next........dishing Rodney Dangerfield?.........

I can't figure out if you are defending Don Rickles... oops errrrr sorry...

I mean...

I can't figure out if you are defending Don Rickles or BONES but in no way was anything I posted was a put down. I love both (and Rodney Dangerfield for that matter) and I am waiting with baited breath for any of them to continue posting... please

Hey, I had a little "hihi" by mine too (will two provide the "all good")?

Oh Hibidy, it's always "all good" between us

Yeah, I knew you were kidding around, Hibidy ... I mostly just wanted to give the thread a little bump in hopes of catching BONES attention

Oh yeah, it's way good fun.....no worries at all.....

[Sascha Franck]

How are the drivers for the built in soundcard on the macbook (non pro)?

Shit. Cheap shit.
They'll add 13ms of "safety buffers" to your latency, regardless of your set buffer size. That's just along the results you'll get from any cheap ass PC laptop.

[Katz]

AUTO-ADMIN: Non-MP3, WAV, OGG, SoundCloud, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter and Facebook links in this post have been protected automatically. Once the member reaches 5 posts the links will function as normal.

For what it's worth, check out this PC Audio laptop: ADK 1Q SR

http://www.adkproaudio.com/ (http://www.adkproaudio.com/)

Any opinions?

[visa tapani]

Bumping this old thread to get more recent views about bootcamp and mac/pc laptop hardware and so forth...

I'm now also in the market for a new laptop, since I'm not able to run almost anything on my old PC laptop anymore without serious clicking and stuttering issues. I was considering a custom made audio-PC from Sonica. However, they only reply to some of my emails and when they do, they only answer half of the questions, so it seems clear that they don't want to do any business with me. Besides, € vs $ is going down fast, so it's starting to get uneconomical to order from the states (not to mention techical support issues and such).

There are a couple of European audio-laptop builders as well, such as the Red Submarine, but their deals don't seem quite as appealing (Ricoh TI and all that). By the way, it's not possible at all to get native 6-pin FW in PC laptops anymore due to the new IEEE spec. All current PC laptops have either a.) no FW, b) a 4-pin FW or c.) a 6-pin FW as an express card (it's still not able to power anything, being an express card and all). Because the 4-pin FW has a lifetime of about two years in my experience, only 6-pin FW is an option. A good express card design similar to the Sonica would be ok for me, but there are only a couple of such laptops on the market.

So, since FW is the only really viable transfer protocol to use for an audio interface, and because PC laptos seem to suck more and more all the time, I'm really starting to consider buying a MacBook Pro and running XP on it. The bulk of the discussion in this thread is over a year old - meanwhile, Leopard has come out with non-beta bootcamp and so forth. So what's the current status of running XP on a Mac laptop?

Also, MacBook Pro's are due to an upgrade anytime soon? Any info on this?

Any other comments/suggestions regarding my situation?

[visa tapani]

Oh yeah, one question I forgot to write in that previous post. I've understood that a major source of problems in audio-work with consumer PC laptops is a small and poorly written BIOS, which in turn leads to resource allocation issues and IRQ conflicts. This is why the custom-made audio-PC's fare better than a similarly configured mass-marketed model.

So, I was thinking about the MacBook (Pro) with this in mind. Does the Macs have a BIOS in the same sense as PCs do? Can I assume that if I install XP on a Mac, the resource allocation works flawlessly, without IRQ conflicts et al? Cause now if I check in my device manager, I have 5 devices on the IRQ channel my firewire port is on, and I suspect this is one of the reasons for the poor audio performance I'm getting...

So, is MacBook Pro the Windows laptop to buy (at least in EU and provided that you need a FW port)?

[mattski]

Visa,

I really don't suggest getting a macbook(pro) and then running windows on it, IF you want to use windows as your base for all your audio editing/producing.

Firstly, from what I know, they emulate BIOS. You cannot change BIOS settings on the mac(don't quote me, there may be hacks on this??), and I'm sure, if you could, they would be one of the best choices.

There was a release of macbook pro's with different firewire chipsets, which caused all this commotion and to this date the only way to fix it (if you get one of those laptops) is to buy a pci firewire card and run your audio interface off that (with external power).. I'm sure this all stems back to BIOS/IRQ settings, etc.

Pain in the butt hey? The same happens on iMac's with the different firewire chip sets.

Right now I am running the audio kontakt 1 usb interface, as my firewire (behringer - meh!) one is not working on windows side. I'm running an iMac..

Don't get me wrong though, if you use logic pro/garage band, the latency you get is minimal. And by minimal, I mean literally non existent. But again, that's a whole different story..

[UltraJv]

Macs dont have a BIOS. They have EFI. Its not configurable as PC BIOS is :

http://refit.sourceforge.net/info/boot_process.html

Bootcamp on the Mac emulates a normal PC BIOS. Its not possible to edit Bootcamps BIOS emulation. The only reason to go to Mac is if you want to run Logic.

[visa tapani]

Thanks for the comments.

Firstly, from what I know, they emulate BIOS. You cannot change BIOS settings on the mac(don't quote me, there may be hacks on this??), and I'm sure, if you could, they would be one of the best choices.

Yeah I was a bit worried about this as well. However, I've discussed this with Jim Roseberry from Studiocat (who gave me the idea to use MBP as a Windows machine in the first place) and he reassured me that it's not a problem. Apparently Bootcamp does a good job emulating the BIOS. Besides, on most consumer-grade PC-laptops the BIOS is small, poorly designed and almost non-customizable as well, so who knows, maybe Bootcamp can do a better job, even? At least on my current Asus, I've never been able to customize anything that matters from the bios (for example, IRQ sharing and resource allocation issues)...

There was a release of macbook pro's with different firewire chipsets, which caused all this commotion and to this date the only way to fix it (if you get one of those laptops) is to buy a pci firewire card and run your audio interface off that (with external power).. I'm sure this all stems back to BIOS/IRQ settings, etc.

Yeah, there was a bunch of MBP's from (if I remember correctly) October '07 to February '08 that had the AgereFW chipset that apparently doesn't work with anything. Needless to say, I'd make sure that the machine I bought would have the TI chipset...

The only reason to go to Mac is if you want to run Logic.

Well, there are as many reasons to use OS X as there are to not use it, but that's an entirely separate question. However getting a (previous generation) MBP seems like a pretty good laptop choice to me, considering how impossible it's to make sure that a PC laptop is DAW-able. The 6-pin native Texas Instruments FW connector (not found on any PC laptop) is a pretty good reason already, and the hardware seems to be top notch otherwise too...

Of course I'll consider all the choices I have, but I haven't found almost any other feasible choice in EU (in US, ADK and Sonica would probably be a better bang-for-buck for a PC laptop)...