Help Me Build The Ultimate Portable Music Studio.., ULTIMATE PORTABLE MUSIC STUDIO.. Options

[stewie7777777]

Hello...I'm a PC-recently-turned-Mac-Lover and Need some Advice...

I want to build The Ultimate Portable Studio that can also Handle playing Multiple Resource-Hogging Plug-ins (Virtual Instruments)...

So, Two Purposes for the laptop:
1) Music Production and Recording (Cubase, Pro Tools)
2) Live Performance (V-Stack)…so in essence A VST Beast!

I plan on buying:
The Akai MPC2500
M-Audio Semi-weighted 88 Keys

Can someone help me out of this overwhelming decision process with What laptop? what interfaces work best...etc...all this "wait-to-buy"..."buy-now- stuff" is crazy

Any advice is Hugely appreciated...

[bcatcho]

I'll just throw some simple advice out there: power book with multiple gigs of ram. The Akai MPC2500 is a very expensive tool and it frustrates me that they don't include a firewire connection (its USB which is not bad but a CPU hog at times). Other than that it's amazing.

Word of warning though: i'm not sure if you are used to playing real pianos or synths, but the keys of the m-audio keystation's are really cheap feeling and aren't heavy enough for my tastes. But for the money it is a great midi controler.