My main recording machine is a self-built quad core 2.4GHz machine, 6GB RAM, SSD, big hard drive etc. However, I'm getting pretty damn tired of breaking it all down, lugging it to our rehearsal studio etc, so I figured I'd get a cheap laptop for recording with the band. The idea was to render the guide track at home with various parts missing and then record the stems as necessary and reassemble on the main recording rig - I figured that there was no way a poxy little laptop would be able to handle 70+ tracks with all the EQ, reverbs etc running. While maintaining reasonable latency (the desktop runs at about 14/15ms).
Oh, how wrong I was.
Enter my eBay-special Toshiba M10 - 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB disk running Vista 32-bit. With the same TC Impact Twin interface, it actually manages slightly lower latency (12/13ms) while recording 4 simultaneous tracks against 70+ with effects, at about 40 - 45% CPU.
All for the princely sum of £120.
Fucking awesome. It's even got a good 2 hours of battery life.
<space for hire>
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Now I'm seeing lots of bargains on ebay that will do the job - I hadn't realised how cheap a two or three year old laptop would be
Quick questions for the techies - to run win7 for office and internet browsing, I figure a core2duo with 2G or more of ram would be fine? or should I go for at least an i3 to avoid shouting at it?
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I just grabbed a dell - 3G of ram and C2D running at 2GHz for £56 I know it's not very wizzy but for work it should do nicely - I'm amazed how quickly prices drop for very usuable machines. That's like buying a les paul standard and selling it 4 years later for less than a squier affinity!
I just grabbed a dell - 3G of ram and C2D running at 2GHz for £56 I know it's not very wizzy but for work it should do nicely - I'm amazed how quickly prices drop for very usuable machines. That's like buying a les paul standard and selling it 4 years later for less than a squier affinity!
This is it - everybody's obsessed with having the latest i3/i5/i7 processors and totally forgets that the older CPUs are perfectly usable. In fact, older machines can often be better than the new ones, particularly when it comes to screen resolution. 1440x900 is infinitely more usable than 1366x768, for example, but you find those machines going for bugger-all (relatively speaking).
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Thanks, well Im no expert but , I tried updating the firewire driver and it said it was the current driver.
Dodgy cable? well it was cheap but it has been working fine with my old vaio desktop.
Message reads..Firestudio device has not initilaized, please check hardware config.
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Well....you know...I dont know !
It seems to be more about the sequence of power up..even then it can still come up with a message saying "not initialized" but if you try again it works.
In general its quite stable...no crashes once it running so considering I was going to spend 1K on a new PC, my £175 laptop was a good buy.
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Reddit r/newmusicreview