2 Jan
2008
2 Jan
'08
6:36 p.m.
Hi Ken & others,
Thanks for all these comments. It becomes more clear to me now.
I'm still thinking about the MacBook however. But not the Pro one. It's much
cheaper and it seems that it will be just great if I use it for audio only.
13" display but in the future I can afford a second bigger screen. Many
linux apps have been ported to OSX, like rosegarden, ardour!, fluidsynth,
jack, freewheeling..and zynaddsubfx but withouth midi..(arg..maybe jackmidi
resolves the problem? I don't know). Of course ideally I would like to have
64Studio or any linux with alsa/jack running on the Mac. There is still no
great support because developers have a lack of Mac machines for testing.
I'm confident for the near future, and I see that UbuntuStudio can be
installed (with some geeky effort), sound works (but I think not yet
alsa/jack/midi and audio apps).
My choice is not made yet of course, so if people think it's not a good idea
at all, please do not hesitate to explain why and/or suggest other good
alternatives...
The MacBook would be dual-core at 2.2Ghz, with a 7200rpm disk if it is
possible to change its 5400 default one, Intel graphics, 2 or 3 GB ram, TI
firewire port chipset.
Thanks.
Julien
On 02/01/2008, Ken Restivo <ken(a)restivo.org> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 02, 2008 at 12:59:26AM +0100, julien lociuro wrote:
--
julien
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.
2) A thing I've read is that one of the biggest downsides to Linux on
portables, especially Apple portables (assuming the LCD and other
peripherals are basically
working) is poor support for power management - sometimes dangerously
poor.
Can anybody tell me if this is still true, and
what does this mean?
You generally want to turn off power management when doing audio.
ACPI is fine (suspend, resume, battery monitoring), but definitely don't
even build the CPU throttling into your kernel. Likewise, disable or remove
any power management daemons other than acpid.
The Mac Mini I had a year ago, didn't support sleep/suspend/resume. I
don't know if they do now or not. I just left the thing on all the time
instead.
3) As an audio card I was thinking about the FireWire Edirol FA-66,
which is
"reported to work" under linux, and is
supported under mac osx.
I had it, it worked great using FreeBoB.
4) What do you think of these laptops? Especially built for audio. But,
can
we trust them..?
http://rainrecording.com/products/livebook
Heh. That's a generic ASUS laptop. I've got the same one:
http://www.restivo.org/blog/archives/flair
ASUS ships barebones laptops without any nameplates (or CPU, or disk, or
DVD, or RAM), so that system integrators can put in what they want and slap
their own badge on there.
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.
6) As it has been told, a Texas Instrument
firewire 1394 chipset is
needed
to get proper performance with the soundcard.
MacBooks have this chipset. But it seems that not a lot of other
laptops
do have this chipset (it seems like Dell
don't have), some HP have.
Anyway
it's difficult to find the information. So
here, the MacBook would
anyway be
a good choice.
Or a US$60 ExpressCard with TI chipset, which is what I ended up having to
buy. It gave me two 6-pin (unpowered) ports too.
7) some interesting laptops include Asus V1s,
Lenovo ThinkPad T61, Dell
Lattitude D830. Anyone using one of those for audio under linux? Do they
have a TI firewire chipset?
It helps if the firmware lets you assign interrupts to devices! I'm told
that the Dells have sane assignments of interrupt pins, and the ThinkPads
let you change them in firmware. I have an ASUS and it works great, because
I use USB for audio, and it does a good job of separating the different USB
devices onto different interrupts. But it slops all the interrupt pins for
all the built-in devices onto one pin and then doesn't let you change them.
That sure sucks.
Also, if you buy a Core Duo laptop, get a SATA drive. The Intel chipset
for my laptop supports SATA only, natively, but ASUS cheated and supplies
"PATA support" using some weird bridge chip. I had trouble with it-- the
BIOS on my laptop does NOT see my PATA drive at all! But Linux does, so it
works, after I escape out of the BIOS screen telling me I don't have any
drives.
8) would a 13" screen be ok..? There is this MacBook (not Pro) which is
dual-core but only at 13". It seems to have great performance (and 700€
less
that the MacBook Pro). 13" has 1280 x 800
resolution. Is that reasonable
or
would I freak out..?:-)Most consumer laptops with
15.4" screens have the
same resolution as 14" and 13.3" screens (1280x800). So if possible
customize a workstation machine with a higher resolution display... like
a
dell lattitude or a lenovo thinkpad. These
machines will allow you to
configure the machine with a a 15.4" display that has a resolution of
1440x900 or 1680x1050
Only you would know that. They are your eyes.
My ASUS laptop is a 15" LCD, but it doesn't do 1440x900, only 1280x800. I
hook it up to an exteral 19" LCD which does ONLY 1440x900, and somehow the
VGA BIOS copes with that. The 19" is much nicer to work with, especially for
apps with lots of knobs and buttons, like Ardour and PHASEX, or which
require lots of real estate, like PD, Patchage, Ingen, etc.
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.
11) I see that some audio applications are ported to MacOsX. Jack,
freewheeling, zynaddsubfx. Although no midi support for zynaddsubfx.
Ardour
I think too.
A dual-boot mac osx, 64-studio would be necessary.
Before I bought the ASUS laptop, I had a Mac Mini that I ran Debian on and
used for audio. I tried to use OSX for audio, and I think I lasted a day. It
drove me nuts. GarageBand was fun to play with, but then it didn't support
exporting MIDI! And the latency was horrific-- like 100ms for some
softsynths. Then I started installing Linux audio apps like the various
JACK-based ones that have been ported: Ardour, Fluidsynth, etc. It quickly
became obvious that I was trying to make a Mac behave like Linux, and
contain all the Linux things I'm used to, and at that point I said to hell
with it and wiped the drive and installed Debian instead. Used that for
about 6 months until I sold it and bought the laptop. It's been all Linux
since then.
One very nice thing about Macs in general is that they're little more than
trendy-looking hardware copy-protection dongles for OSX, so they retain
their value very, very well. I bought the Mac Mini used, from a kid that had
bought it with his student discount, and I ended up selling it 6 months
later for more than I paid for it. If you buy a MacBook and you don't like
it, there are probably plenty of people who would buy it from you.
-ken