2 Jan
2008
2 Jan
'08
4:11 p.m.
On Jan 2, 2008 3:31 AM, Ken Restivo <ken(a)restivo.org> wrote:
Macbook Pro IS a powered 6 Pin firewire port. That is a large part of why I
buy the Apple machines is they provide this. It is not to spec however in
that it only supplies 7 Watts of power instead of the 15, however I have not
had a problem running most things off of my Powerbook or MacBook Pro.
There are a few, though I tend to try to stay away from them. At any rate
if you aren't doing anything that needs 3D Ken is correct, the intel chipset
would be fine.
Seablade
On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 12:59:26AM +0100, julien
lociuro wrote:
Hmm haven't heard of BIOSes not supporting a 7200 RPM drive myself. Common
upgrade even on laptops in my experience.
At any rate, it gets much more complex when running the OS/Software and the
Audio off the same disk. For low track counts it will likely be fine.
However you will likely run into problems well before 48 tracks. It depends
on what you are doing. It is recommended to have an external disk however
for that reason, it is a little extra safety form having a dropout in a
performance.
Hi all,
As you probably know from my previous post (MacBook Pro or not..) I plan
to
buy a laptop for audio work.
Here some questions that arise after some investigation.
1) It is recommended to have 2 separate hard drives. One for os/programs
and
one for audio files.
Is it though necessary to have the first one, say the internal one
at
7200rpm, if the second one (external, USB-2) used
for audio files is
7200?
Problem is that most of laptops have 5400rpm
for their internal
drive.
I've got only one drive and no problem. It's a 7200RPM drive-- not
supported by my laptop BIOS. If you're going to be streaming recording or
playing 48 tracks simultaneously, you might need separate drives. I'm mostly
doing softsynths so CPU was more important than disk.
Also, MAKE SURE that your BIOS supports 7200RPM drives. Mine does not.
Linux does, but it's annoying for the BIOS to complain about no disk being
present, every time I boot. http://www.musicxpc.com/prodtemplate.asp
5) Not all laptops have a firewire port. Most have an extension card
slot
(express, etc..) which can be used to have
firewire. But from what I've
heard, linux doesn't have (good) drivers to support those cards. Most of
laptops which have firewire have a 4-pin (not ok if you want the 2
additional to have power supply for the card, which is nice for live
performance). MacBook(Pro) has a 6-pin firewire port.
It's unlikely to be a powered 6-pin, though, so you'll probably still need
the power cube to run the FA-66.
9) The mac book has a Intel GMA X3100 graphic card (with 144 MB SDRAM
DDR2)
shared (not dedicated) with main memory. Is this
a problem for audio
processing only? Also, is this card supported under linux? mac book pro
on
the other hand has an NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT,
which would be more
supported
I think.
If you won't be gaming, don't worry about it. I picked my laptop
specifically because it has the INTEL video chipset-- probably the
worst-performing crap out there, but at the time it was the only one open
and free and supported in Linux with Free Software drivers, and that is very
important to me. My computer isn't just my instrument and studio and
communications device, and life, really, but it is also a political
statement for me. I haven't yet seen an audio app that requires proprietary
3D video acceleration, for example, so I wasn't missing much.