500 pound laptop studio?

[danbroad]

Hi folks, I'm about to dip my toes into the world of laptop recording..... but am I going to be disappointed?

I found a reputable seller offering IBM 900MHz 256RAM 20Gb HDD Thinkpads for £313 plus vat on ebay.co.uk [with 12 months RTB warranty, no less], and also another gent who was selling his Echo Indigo PCMCIA card for £74. {if you are either of those sellers reading this, thanks very much you guys..]

I'm going to try my copy of Traction on it, maybe with FM7 and PPG wave and Attack and Synth1. If that doesn't wash, then I'll get Reason ... and I thought abou one of those M-audio ekeys controllers for ultra portability..

I'm realistic about my laptop's capabilities; I tend nowadays to record single vsti's and bounce down anyway... so I don't intend to run 60 simultaneous tracks etc etc...I think it'll do nicely, given that those synths are all fairly low CPU.

Some of you chaps must have been recording on laptops when PIII 900MHz chips were new...

PIII 900
256 RAM
20GB HDD
Echo Indigo
...all for 450£...
VSTi's only

So....given my synths, and the host, and my work pattern.....Am I ging to be disappointed?

[püRe]

I'm pretty sure you won't...but you'll be wanting more CPU in a matter of days, so decide wisely...

[danbroad]

thanks for the tip.. I've actually bought this laptop [my wife and I are to share it for simple powerpoint and word applications.]

I figured that I'll see what I can do to make this laptop sing, and then perhaps go for the big purchase and replace the desktop in a year or so. If it works..

Any other folks out there with experience working on this speed and type of laptop setup.. even if it was two years ago?

[danbroad]

I've just seen the horrible spelling mistakes in my first post. Sorry, folks, I'm usually a real stickler for my spelling...just goes to show you should never hit that 'submit' button without checking first. I blame this bottle of wine I've just gotto finish tonight...

Anyway, back on topic, I'd be grateful for any seasoned laptop users' advice!!

[blaster78]

i run an ibm t22 (as well as several other machines) which has the exact same spec except less memory (i only have 128mb in that machine) and i have used it with my roland u8 (usb souncard control panel thing) with cubasis vst (it came with it at the time)

it ran ok, you could get enough out of it to do quite reasonable tunes ie. you could have quite a few audio tracks running and enough vst's to bounce some stuff ocassionally and run some fx on the audio channels.

i've never used reason but thats supposed to be very easy on the cpu/memory so i suspect you cold do a lot of stuff with that.

let me know if you want me to check anything out for you (within reason) as i use it for my dmz machine so reinstall it regularly and if you want me to install a demo of trackion and a couple of demo vst and give you some becnhmarks i'm happy to do that.

cheers,

steve.

[scuzzphut]

maybe you should pick up that plugin that converts keypresses into midi notes (was it trollo or something? ) or tobybear has a similar thing I think.

as for the laptop spec - if you're bouncing to audio lots, you'll get tons of mileage - plus, if you're keeping the desktop for final masters or big mixes, you're laughing

[Robert Randolph]

Yes, tobybear min-host does it.


I was wondering why you had such a heavy laptop at first haha

[moldofunker]

you better check out ebay.com, there are better prices for laptops. UK market is soooo expensive